Publication: Uganda’s Virtual Poverty Fund : Pro-Poor Spending Reform
Date
2008-03
ISSN
Published
2008-03
Author(s)
Sudharshan Canagarajah
Tim Williamson
Abstract
The provision of debt relief to Heavily
Indebted Poor Country (HIPCs) commencing in the late 1990s,
and the growing interest among donors in providing direct
budget support, increased donor focus on national budget
systems. Given that debt relief and aid resources are
fungible, donors were concerned that such debt relief be
verifiably used to benefit the poor in the recipient
country. In effect, the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund (IMF), acting on behalf of donors, asked that
HIPC governments put in place systems to track the use of
resources freed up by debt relief and show that these were
in fact used to finance pro-poor programs. This required
governments to have the capacity to identify policies and
programs that would benefit the poor and to effectively
channel and track resources to such programs. This note
considers the Uganda Virtual Poverty Fund (VPF) to
understand how well it served to allocate resources to
pro-poor programs and what weaknesses were observed that may
need to be corrected as other countries employ mechanisms
similar to the VPF.
Citation
“Sudharshan Canagarajah; Tim Williamson. 2008. Uganda’s Virtual Poverty Fund : Pro-Poor Spending Reform. Africa Region Findings & Good Practice Infobriefs; No. 288. © http://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/7dca782f-6f0e-5e60-843a-dbb063a2dd9c License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”