Sub-Saharan Africa's poverty reduction strategy papers from social policy and sustainable livelihoods perspectives

DfID paper that asks: how far are social policy and livelihood issues/ approaches currently incorporated in Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs)? Can sustainable livelihood (SL) approaches strengthen and add value to national level policy on poverty reduction?

The report is based on a review of published IPRSPs and PRSPs from Africa, as well as joint staff assessments (JSAs) of the World Bank and IMF, and finds that:

• PRS documents recognise that poverty is multidimensional and multi-causal, but they tend not to pay attention to sustainable livelihood strategies or to social dimensions of anti-poverty strategies
• neither the PRSP documents nor the JSA reviews make significant use of terms such as 'sustainability', 'vulnerability', 'security', 'inequality', 'social integration', 'rights', 'empowerment', and 'ethnicity'. This may indicate a need for technical assistance to strengthen the use of conceptual approaches associated with these terms. It may also be that for political reasons some of these issues can only emerge gradually through sensitive approaches to participatory consultation
• livelihood analysis is either rudimentary or (more often) non-existent in the documents. The term 'livelihood' is not in general use and is applied primarily to agriculture
• urban livelihoods are barely addressed at all, despite the fact that most countries exhibit rising levels of urban poverty and project steep increases in urban populations. Urban-rural linkages such as migration and remittances are similarly under-analysed. PRS documents do not exhibit an appreciation of the multidimensionality of livelihood strategies. The 'rural sector' is seen as a priority in all documents, with the main emphasis on increased agricultural productivity as the central plank in national poverty reduction strategies. It will be necessary for PRS processes to include livelihood-type analysis, based on profiling which distinguishes the kinds of asset base which different categories of people have access to, and which identifies the processes affecting the security or vulnerability of people'slivelihood strategies
• PRS documents are weak in their analysis of the sustainability of anticipated improvements in livelihoods. Sustainability analysis could be strengthened by identification of pathways towards aid-independence, risk analysis, environmental assessment, formal and informal social protection, and recognition of the role of savings in livelihood security

There is scope for further international dialogue on what is realistic to expect of PRSPs in terms of data, analytical rigour, and strategic detail, and for technical guidance in preparation of PRSPs. [From the author]