Shanghai Agenda on Poverty Reduction

After an unprecedented south-south knowledge exchange on worldwide poverty reduction efforts, the Shanghai consensus established that achieving the MDGs will depend not only on increasing resources but also on a renewed commitment to adapting and accelerating successful approaches. Invaluable in helping to reach this conclusion has been the Global Learning Process , which showed that scaling-up is possible when countries have the right ideas, the support to implement them, and an environment conducive to long-term management and implementation.

The process made it clear that development is a long-term transformation requiring sustained commitment and strong country capacity to manage development processes toward desired outcomes. There is consensus on what needs to be done to accelerate development at the country level:

	Countries must be in charge of their own development, and development strategies have to be tailored to country circumstances.
	Any effort to successfully reduce poverty must be comprehensive and well-coordinated, but development initiatives need to be sequenced and moved forward opportunistically taking into account country circumstances.
	Growth is critical for job creation and poverty reduction but it must be pro-poor and accompanied by investments in poor people through adequate and effective service delivery.
	A supportive international environment is an important complement to countries' own actions.

Other lessons and insights vital to scaling up emphasize the importance of:

	Sustained and continuous political commitment and leadership
	Programs conceived in a participatory manner that address the most pressing needs of large numbers of people
	Government accountability
	Appropriate sequencing of reforms and attention to their political economy
	Results tracking, periodic evaluations, and information dissemination
	Communication of results
	Institutional innovation to respond to evolving needs
	Adequate external and domestic financing

The conference reaffirmed that the time is right to take these lessons forward to help accelerate and broaden results on poverty reduction. Moreover, the conference participants agreed that it is necessary and urgent to scale up actions by both developing and developed countries if the MDGs are to be achieved.

As the Millennium Summit in 2005 approaches, and with only a decade left until the target date for achieving Millennium Development Goals in 2015, taking forward the lessons learned in Shanghai was deemed to be of the greatest urgency.

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