[stop-imf] Ongoing IMF conditionality - Uganda case study

[Robert Weissman]

New Strageies; Old Loan Conditions

Do the New IMF and World Bank Loans Support Countries’
Poverty Reduction Stratgey Papers?

The Case of Uganda

By

Warren Nyamugasira, Uganda National NGO Forum, Kampala
and
Rick Rowden, RESULTS Educational Fund, Washington, DC
With Assistance from Action Aid

April 2002

Published In Kampala And Washington DC On The Eve Of
The World Bank And International Monetary Fund Spring Meetings, April 2002
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This new report draws attention to the way the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund continue to do business in many of the world’s
poorest countries.  The authors show that unfortunately the new IMF and
World Bank loans to Uganda still contain the same highly controversial loan
conditions that have been raising serious concerns for over 20 years, this
despite the new Poverty Reduction Strategy process.

In 1999, these two international financial institutions announced a major
change in the way they will conduct business throughout the developing
world.   The IMF and World Bank promised they would no longer impose
“top-down” policy reforms on poor countries and instead claimed they would
begin to listen to “the voices of the poor”.  This would be done by having
borrowing governments draft new documents called Poverty Reduction Strategy
Papers that would be based on input from several open, public consultations
with labor unions, religious organizations, nonprofit groups and
non-governmental organizations within each country.  The PRSPs are supposed
to be “road maps” for reducing poverty in every country.

Then the IMF and World Bank made an important new claim: that all of their
subsequent loans to developing countries would be based on the
poverty-reduction goals outlined in countries’ PRSPs.

Uganda was one of the first countries to finish its PRSP document and then
receive new loans from the IMF and World Bank: the Poverty Reduction and
Growth Facility (PRGF) and Poverty Reduction Support Credit (PRSC).
Therefore, Warren Nyamugasira and Rick Rowden teamed up to investigate the
contents of the two new loans to Uganda to analyze if they actually support
the poverty-reduction goals that were outlined in Uganda’s PRSP.  Based on
secondary materials and interviews with leading officials within the
Government of Uganda, multilateral institutions and civil society
organizations in Uganda and Washington DC over 2001, this study presents
evidence that crucial policy prescriptions within the PRGF and PRSC may
impair Uganda’s ability to effectively realize its anti-poverty and growth
goals.


For a complete copy of the new report, contact Rick Rowden at:
(202)783-7100 or request  a copy via email at: rowden@action.org



“It is a very comprehensive analysis, and perhaps one of the first of its
kind by civil society in Uganda, which provides a critical perspective to
this topic”.
Dr. Joe Oloka-Onyango
Dean of Law, Makerere University
Kampala, Uganda


“I congratulate the authors for a very brilliant job done in exhaustively
bringing together several macro, national and international processes that
are collectively influencing upon the poverty eradication goals. I am not
aware of another study yet, at the country level that brings together WB,
IMF and WTO programmes and policies and the way they together threaten
poverty eradication goals.”
Meenu Vadera
Country Director, Action Aid Uganda
Kampala, Uganda


“There is a significant disconnect between the World Bank’s rhetoric and the
reality of its operations on the ground.  The authors masterfully contrast
rhetoric and reality in the context of Uganda.  They reveal how so-called
participation processes can provide “window dressing” for creditor and donor
driven schemes.  This is a “must read” for people seeking to influence the
political economy of reform.”
Nancy Alexander
Executive Director, Globalization Challenge Initiative
Takoma Park, Maryland, USA


“It is the first attempt I have come across to explore empirically, and not
from a donor perspective, drawing in a wide range of different actors'
perspectives, the question of how far the PRSP framework really is a new
approach and how far it -- and all the commendable principles it claims to
embody -- are in fact a legitimization device, no more than old wine in new
bottles.  For that alone it would be inherently valuable.”
Rosemary McGee
Research Fellow, Institute for Development Studies
University of Sussex, Brighton, UK