OVC Toolkit

The participatory processes to develop the government’s PRSP and the Bank’s CAS are important opportunities to get the issue of OVC on the national radar screen. Both encourage extensive consultations at the national, regional and local level, with elected and appointed government officials, as well as with NGOs, churches, labor unions, women and youth groups, and community based organizations. These stakeholder meetings could be organized around the needs of specific interest groups, such as women, youth, children, and devote particular attention to vulnerable groups such as landless farmers, OVC, the disabled and the and elderly. The approach described in the section “Organizing a Stakeholder Meeting” could be applied during these consultations.

PRSP and the CAS present opportunities to analyze OVC issues using a wide-angled lens, not from the limited perspective of just one sector. These medium-term planning processes also allow for strategic thinking, more likely to generate preventive approaches to problems, rather than responses based on assistance to children who are already critically vulnerable. The objectives established during these processes are frequently linked with the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). Thus, these processes provide an opening for the issues related to OVC to be addressed through bold policy measures, such as a commitment to provide a primary education to all children, whether they are disabled, orphaned, or living in the street or in an HIV/AIDS-affected household.

What steps could be followed to make sure that OVC issues are reflected in the PRSP and CAS?

Get buy-in from the top: The first step is to provide the Country Director and his Government counterpart the information they need to see that addressing OVC issues as part of a medium-term development strategy will be key to achieving the MDGs they choose to prioritize in the PRSP and CAS. The arguments laid out in the Rationale Section of this toolkit should prove helpful to this end. If there's no buy-in at the top, OVC issues will either be dropped all together or relegated to an afterthought paragraph (as was the case for gender not long ago). Getting support from Bank management is most important, because then, even if the government does not see OVC as a priority issue, the Bank can help offer some arguments that may help government see the value of investing in OVC and the long-term risks –- social, economic, and political – of ignoring their needs. From a practical standpoint, this means making sure that the budget for preparing the CAS includes funds to finance OVC Sector Work, either as self-standing or as part of a broader social protection focus.

Document OVC status: The Background Data section in this toolkit is a good starting point for this step. The chapter entitled Working with Partners will also be useful in fleshing out a comprehensive understanding of the status of OVC, particularly the section on the stakeholders meeting.

Piggy-back on widely accepted goals: Even if you succeed in obtaining buy-in from the top, you will probably have a hard time in making the case for an OVC-specific section or strategy because you will be competing with many other “special interests”. The arguments that proved effective in obtaining buy-in from decision-makers will probably suggest how best to “package” OVC issues to ensure that they are included. For example, if the PRSP or the CAS are developed around the MDGs, universal access to education or health could be the overall goal, with OVC inclusion being a condition to reach it, and therefore an intermediate objective. Similarly, if one of the aims of a PRSC is to support judiciary reform, the adoption and application of inheritance laws that protect the rights of orphans could be one of the monitoring indicators.

Project the impact of the OVC situation on achieving the MDGs: Piggy-backing on objectives related to the MDGs is likely to be the best way to get OVC on the agenda of strategy-setting documents such as the PRSP and the CAS, therefore the Toolkit provides some specific suggestions on how to go about it. The starting point would be the problem tree exercise carried out during the stakeholders meeting.

Once you have analyzed each of the OVC categories and gained an understanding of the factors that contribute to children falling through the cracks and the consequences of such failures, you will need to analyze how each of these failures will impact on the country achieving each of the relevant MDGs.

This can be done using a variant of the worksheet presented in the Working with Partners chapter “Determining whether your project could potentially create new OVC or have an impact on existing OVC”. In this case the second column would include the impact on the MDGs of each factor or root that you identified during the problem tree exercise and the third would include measures prevent or address the problem.

For example, the first factor in the chart, “Mother Dies” will clearly have a negative impact on reaching Goal 5: Reduce maternal mortality, and very likely an indirect impact on achieving several of the other MDGs. The third column, is for noting measures that could be taken to prevent or mitigate this outcome. For example, an effective AIDS prevention program and improved prenatal care and care at delivery might decrease the chance that mothers die.

To illustrate the outcome of this exercise, click here to see an example, which is an excerpt from the table developed to address the factors that contribute to and the consequences of orphanhood. Clearly, most countries do not have the financial capacity to implement all of these measures, so they would need to prioritize those that they felt would have the greatest positive impact on the OVC and, in turn, their ability to achieve their MDG targets. To do this, you can use the ranking tool presented in the "Deciding what to do" section .

Use monitoring to ensure that OVC are not forgotten: Monitoring indicators can be a powerful tool to draw attention (and resources) to OVC. Both PRSP and CAS should suggest indicators that make it possible to track the number and relative wellbeing of OVC. More comprehensive lists of indicators for monitoring the situation of the various OVC groups are presented in the section on Monitoring and Evaluation. These indicators, in turn, can be used to monitor PRSC results, which is all the more reason to insist that they be part of the regular poverty monitoring measures that are part of PRSP.