Key reformer gets new poverty reduction credit

The World Bank has made Uganda the first country to benefit from a Poverty Reduction Support Credit, a new approach to lending which is designed to help low-income countries with strong reform programmes to carry out their poverty reduction strategies. Uganda is to receive a US $150 million credit to help align donor programmes with its institutional reform and poverty reduction strategies, and to help implement the poverty strategy itself, according to the World Bank. The credit would particularly help the government improve the delivery of basic services, not least to the 35 percent of the population that remains in acute poverty despite the country’s “impressive economic performance” in the past decade, said World Bank Country Director Jim Adams. Uganda has received the $150 million credit to tackle poverty as one of just four countries to have completed a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP), which is increasingly becoming the blueprint for debt relief and concessional lending. [for further details, go to: www.worldbank.org/afr] The credit is aimed at supporting Kampala’s reform programme, thereby improving public service delivery, through improving efficiency and equity in the use of public resources, and improving government practices, transparency and anti-corruption measures. Vitally, it is also intended to support an improvement in access to and quality of eduction, health care and water and sanitation services, in order to improve the quality of life of the poor.