The collaboration the U4 launched at Utstein covered a wide variety of development issues handled by different international institutions. This involved in the first place coordination of their positions at the World Bank and the IMF, and the UN and its funds, programmes, and agencies. The World/Bank IMF were very important both because of the size and extent of their own programmes but also for helping developing countries manage the overall poverty reduction strategies within which all bilateral aid was supposed to fit. Increasing the effectiveness of bilateral aid could only succeed if it were part of a consistent overarching multilateral effort. This chapter starts with a discussion of U4 efforts to ensure that the poverty reduction strategies developed with the help of the World Bank/IMF in connection with debt relief actually reflected developing country priorities. It then moves on to U4’s efforts to improve the effectiveness of UN programmes which tended to be characterized by fragmentation and inefficiencies. The last part addresses the problem of coherence and collaboration between the IMF and the World Bank—the international financial institutions, on the one hand, and the UN and its agencies, on the other.
Pro-poor health policies in poverty reduction strategies