Publication: Linking Participatory Poverty Assessments to Policy and Policymaking : Experience from Vietnam
Date
2001-01
ISSN
Published
2001-01
Author(s)
Turk, Carrie
Abstract
The year 1999 was important for
poverty-related research, and policy development in Vietnam.
The General Statistics Office had collected household data
in the second Vietnam Living Standards Survey in 1998, and
made it available for analysis in 1999. And four
participatory poverty assessments (PPAs) were implemented
during 1999. The author's case study describes how
government agencies, donors, and nongovernmental
organizations collaborated in implementing the PPAs. The
considerable amount of qualitative information about poverty
produced in Vietnam over the past eight to ten years has
rarely grabbed the attention of policymakers, who tend to
view such information as "unscientific" and
lacking in credibility. By contrast, the PPAs implemented in
1999 have been widely circulated, used, and quoted. What was
different about those PPAs that led their findings to be
brought into local, and national policy debates, as previous
findings had not been? Working partnerships among donors,
and nongovernmental organizations were important, and helped
build consensus on the research findings, but more crucial
was the active engagement of government partners from the
very early stages. Establishing a Poverty Working Group
provided a structure for implementing the PPAs, for feeding
analysis through to the poverty assessment, and for keeping
government fully involved. The Poverty Working Group now
supports the government in drafting its poverty reduction
strategy. Strong World Bank leadership, financial support
from the U.K. Department for International Development, the
technical expertise, and commitment of the PPA partners
agencies, and the availability of recent high-quality
household survey data, played an important part in ensuring
the PPAs' credibility.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Turk, Carrie. 2001. Linking Participatory Poverty Assessments to Policy and Policymaking : Experience from Vietnam. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 2526. © World Bank, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/19735 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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