Promoting Local Service Delivery in Asia for the Millennium Development Goals

UNCDF and UNDP organize regional workshop in New Delhi

New Delhi, 12 December 2005 -- In partnership with the UNDP Regional Centre in Bangkok, the UN Capital Development Fund organized a workshop on the theme of "Financing Service Delivery: Challenges and Opportunities". The workshop, held on 7th-9th December at the National Institute for Public Finance & Policy in New Delhi, brought together some 65 government policy-makers, local government officials, researchers, civil society advocates and donor officials from 15 Asian countries to discuss the more practical sorts of policy issues which are frequently missed in the literature and in conferences on decentralisation.

In particular, the workshop placed special emphasis on policy measures to promote the service delivery capacities of local governments in rural areas of Asia, where the "MDG deficits" are greatest. Topics covered in the workshop ranged from issues of local tax revenues, centre-local transfer and revenue-sharing arrangements, mapping of institutional roles in service delivery, and accountability mechanisms. Participants focussed both on identifying constraints in these areas and on tracing their impact on service delivery outcomes, but also on highlighting a number of promising innovations in the region which might be replicated: e.g. from the fairly radical implementation of Panchayati Raj constitutional provisions in the Indian States of Kerala and Karnataka, to citizen monitoring of local governments in Thailand and perfomance-based funding of service delivery in Bangladesh.

In addressing the workshop, Kadmiel Wekwete, director of UNCDF's Local Development Unit, noted that while the extreme diversity of country context and local government setup across Asia certainly prevents any "one size fits all" approach, there are nonetheless many such innovations in policy and practice which can and should be shared much more widely and that there is clearly much appetite by policy-makers to learn from such practical experiences which go beyond the generic normative recommendations they all too often receive.

As follow up to the workshop it is intended to launch a programme of applied research and exchange in these areas of "micro-policy", with an eye to the specific features of decentralisation in the key sectors where service delivery must be greatly enhanced if the MDGs are to be met : health, education, water, sanitation, transport, etc.. UNCDF will be working with UNDP's Regional Centres in Bangkok and Colombo in this programme, and both the World Bank and UNICEF have also expressed interest to be associated in this.