Looking for More from Adjustment : Africa's Experience
By the mid-1990s, after more than 15 years of adjustment lending, it had become clear that adjustment programs in Africa had not accelerated growth or reduced poverty, except in a handful of countries. The main reasons? Recipient governments did no...
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| Format: | Brief |
| Language: | English |
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World Bank, Washington, DC
2012
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/1999/05/1047351/looking-more-adjustment-africas-experience http://hdl.handle.net/10986/11482 |
| Summary: | By the mid-1990s, after more than 15
years of adjustment lending, it had become clear that
adjustment programs in Africa had not accelerated growth or
reduced poverty, except in a handful of countries. The main
reasons? Recipient governments did not "own" the
reform programs, and they perceived the conditionality
attached to the programs as being imposed on them.
Adjustment programs were often unresponsive to country
conditions and changes in external circumstances. In most
cases the World Bank and recipient governments did not have
a shared vision of what adjustment programs were supposed to
achieve. In response to this diagnosis, in 1995 the
Bank's Africa Region introduced the Higher Impact
Adjustment Lending (HIAL) initiative. The initiative aimed
to achieve a quicker, stronger, broader, and longer supply
response from structural adjustment programs by: 1)
increasing country selectivity and strengthening government
ownership; 2) allowing more flexibility in adjustment
operations--in particular, introducing new tranching
mechanisms; and 3) introducing performance indicators to
define expected results and assess actual outcomes. This
note describes how the approach and design of these
operations were adapted to achieve higher impact. |
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