World Bank draws fresh clout through TASAF

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World Bank draws fresh clout through TASAF

2008-03-17 09:03:17
By Perege Gumbo

The World Bank has mentioned Tanzania Social Action Fund (TASAF) initiative as proof that its community-driven development (CDD) strategy is well-designed.

TASAF was established in 2000 based on development approach known as Social Development (SD) strategy whose aim is to enhance cohesion and accountability of various institutions involved in development efforts.

TASAF now covers rural areas in 40 districts on the mainland and Zanzibar.

TASAF's activities have been scaled up to include all districts until next year and its projects have in practice empowered communities to identify, implement, and monitor their own development.

The Bank has in fact revived this lending strategy in many ways which requires project beneficiaries to assume greater accountability in social progress and sharing of rewards.

The SD strategy, which has been approved by the Bank's Board of Directors, entails among other things, institutions inclusion in order to promote equal access to opportunities, enabling everyone to contribute to social progress and sharing of rewards.

Steen L. Jorgensen, Director of Social Development Department at the Bank told a stakeholders gathering the fresh momentum being fostered by the Bank would empower people through institutional transformation.

He mentioned the principles of the SD as cohesive societies, and institutional accountability ``transparency and responding to the public interest in effective, efficient and fair ways.

In cohesive societies, women and men are facilitated to work together to address common needs, overcome constraints and consider diverse interests.

The women and men learn to resolve differences in a civil, non-confrontation way, promoting peace and security he said.

Following adaptation of the SD, he said, the World Bank has successfully incorporated the key SD principles into the preparation of many projects.

More than 4000 world Bank-funded projects in the last thirty years have been implanted by paying attention to SD leading to improved project impacts and sustainability.

The strategic objectives of the approach include strengthening policy dialogue and development support lending and improve project effectiveness.

The use of SD is traditionally based on Community-Driven Development (CDD) which emphasises resource transfer to poor communities and community participation in service provision.

The recent trend in the CDD support has been towards intergovernmental and related reforms to strength decentralised local governance.

The World Bank's CDD portfolio stands at between USD1.5 and USD1.8 billion available for lending per year.

However, he said over 60 percent of the CDD portfolio has been directed to South Asia and Africa regions where efforts have been concentrated on the integration of CDD approaches at a programmatic level particularly on decentralisation, financial management, transparency and accountability.

* SOURCE: Guardian
 
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