Poverty reduction strategy papers (PRSPs)52 provide opportunities for government officials to learn how to work with and for young people. The Vietnam Government, in developing their poverty reduction strategy, commissioned an NGO (Save the Children) to conduct three consultations with children and young people in particularly poor urban areas over the course of five years. The purpose of the consultations was to feed into the formulation of the strategy, and to provide opportunities for young people and children to review the implementation of the strategy.

The first assessment in 1999, before PRSPs existed, was to inform national development planning and the World Bank’s Vietnam Development Report on poverty. The second consultation in 2001 sourced feedback on the interim PRSP and policy for the PRSP. The third consultation in 2003 was part of a review of progress on the implementation of the country’s first PRSP.

Problems addressed:

• The lack of long-term assessments/studies on how children and youth can contribute towards national PRSPs;
• A youthful perspective can highlight unrecognised/unseen areas, leading to significant positive policy changes.

Objectives:

• To provide data and evidence to feed into the development of a poverty reduction strategy;
• To consult children and young people (ages five to 18) in urban areas on their experience of poverty;
• To track progress of the poverty reduction strategy through gaining feedback from children and young people.

Youth as beneficiaries

Four hundred and sixty-five young people (six to 18 years) from three poor districts of Ho Chi Minh City acted as survey respondents and participants.

Youth as partners

Two young people drawn from HIV/AIDS peer education acted as facilitators.

Process

• This was a mixture of discussion groups, interviews and participatory workshops.
• The first consultation acted as a baseline assessment of poverty in the area.
• The two subsequent consultations incorporated an element of monitoring against past objectives and tracking the progress of government efforts in the area.
• Some participants were also invited to form part of the facilitation team during the third consultation, introducing an element of peer education to the process and building the capacity of those individuals.
• The children and young people’s input ran alongside consultations with a wide range of adult community members, but the children and young people’s process was conducted separately to ensure children and young people felt comfortable expressing themselves and their views were heard independently of adults.
• Consultations took place in areas where Save the Children does significant work; staff could feel confident they were not engaging young people in consultations that would lead nowhere.

Results

• The PRSP has greater reference to young people. The government is thinking about the impact of poverty on children and young people, and declarations in the PRSP make it easier for communities to hold the government to account for its action on such issues.
• The research was used by Save the Children as part of the expansion of their activities.
• By the third consultation in-depth analysis was developed on causes and consequences of poverty; the level of depth would not have been possible with a one-off consultation.
• Local officials were able to learn from the process of children and young people’s participation and were able to directly apply that learning in their wider work.
• Participants highlighted the plight of the growing number of migrant families in the capital who are not registered by the authorities and who have major problems accessing healthcare, education and social welfare services. Their information helped change procedures to allow unregistered migrants access to services more quickly. This was a major step forward in a city where up to a third of the population of some wards are ‘hidden’ unregistered migrants.

Lessons learned

• Young people can raise important issues often overlooked, such as the impact of family debt and divorce on social development.
• Strategies and policies developed on the basis of evidence and research are more likely to be effective and targeted at those most in need.
• For young people to hold governments to account, mechanisms should be in place for information sharing with young people, and complaints/ feedback mechanisms for young people. The more sustainable and durable these are the more effective their impact.

Potential challenges

• Longer term consultations can be more costly (but benefits also can be greater).
• Maintaining a productive partnership between the government/donor and the independent contracted agency.
• Governments and donor agencies need to be willing to be open to new ideas: the evidence collected can sometimes be surprising or at odds with long-standing beliefs.
• Although over half of the researchers were government staff and the methodology had been approved and used twice before, the third consultation met with a critical response. The government claimed that the research, which identified 30 to 50% of households in the two targeted districts as poor, failed to recognise the success of the government’s poverty alleviation programme.

For further information contact:

Save the Children Vietnam, (part of US): twebster@savechildren.org

• 52. Poverty reduction strategy papers are the replacement for structural adjustment programmes, and are documents required by the IMF and World Bank before a country can be considered for debt relief.