While urging the government to continue with reforms, the meeting also urged the government to develop national as well as sectoral monitoring and evaluation policy, and enforce monitoring and evaluation guidelines from the next fiscal to ensure effectiveness of the donor funded projects.
During the meeting, held for two days with an aim to improve the performance of the projects, the donors including Asian Development Bank, UK department for International Development (DFID), Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and the World Bank had presented reports of the projects carried out under their support.
During the discussions on key issues facing the foreign aid funded projects, the donors and Nepali officials identified poor disbursement, cumbersome environmental assessment process, lack of land acquisition and resettlement policy and law, and problems faced at operational level as major challenges facing Nepal´s foreign aid funded projects.
To do away with these challenges, the meeting recommended for the formation of Technical Working Group with major stakeholders to focus on results and the longer-term budgeting process.
It also urged the donors and concerned officials to coordinate the budget with next Three-Year Interim Plan. The meeting also suggested various measures to do away with problems related to human resources and capacity gaps.
Speaking on the occasion, Nepali officials had raised concerns over lack of timely completion of foreign-funded projects. "Project startup period in Nepal is too long, despite past commitments to reduce common start up delays and ensure quality at entry," said Finance Secretary Rameshwar Khanal, pinpointing that such delays have been rendering the aid effectiveness slow.
Finance Minister Surendra Pandey stressed on the need for reforms in the whole project cycle. He also suggested the donors to allocate adequate budget in the high priority sectors, so that the country could achieve its development goals.
He also indicated on the need of ´Project Bank´ to make the allocation realistic and implement projects on time.
Donors, on the other hand, attributed challenges and deficiencies at the operational level for the poor performances of some of their projects.
NPPR is an annual review exercise started since 2000, first initiated by the donors and owned by the government since 2006.
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