Improved monitoring of poverty-environment objectives in Tanzania
In Tanzania, the Poverty-Environment Initiative has been successful in strenghtening and improving the national monitoring and reporting system on poverty-environment objectives. As a result, a new environment statistics module was incorporated into Tanzania’s web based Social Economic Database, which helps improving quality of monitoring of the implementation of Tanzania’s key planning tool, the National Strategy for Growth and Poverty Reduction (MKUKUTA) and its poverty-environment goals .
In 2005, PEI successfully integrated environmental sustainability targets and indicators into the National Strategy for Growth and Poverty Reduction (MKUKUTA) and its Monitoring System. Environmental concerns were integrated into the Growth and Poverty Reduction, Enhancing Social Services and Improving Governance clusters of the MKUKUTA: 16 out of 96 development targets are related to environment.
In order to support the effective monitoring of progress in the achievement of MKUKUTA Output targets, the Vice President’s Office led an inter-sectoral process to identify Poverty and Environment Indicators. This resulted in a comprehensive report on the “development of indicators of poverty-environment linkages” which provides a step-by-step approach to the understanding of the poverty-environment linkages and gives guidance on how to develop poverty-environment indicators.
The report recommended a total of ninety-five indicators at national and sector level to measure progress with regard to poverty and environment objectives and proposed thirty-four indicators for inclusion in the MKUKUTA Monitoring System. The MKUKUTA National Monitoring Review process resulted in the incorporation of 10 of these indicators as part of the total of 60 indicators for the MKUKUTA Monitoring System (2001-2010).
In order to improve the reporting on poverty and environment indicators in the MKUKUTA Annual Implementation Progress Report, PEI worked with the National Bureau of Statistics in 2009-2010 to enhance its Socio Economic Database used as the basis for generating the progress report. As a result a new environment statistics module was incorporated into Tanzania’s web based Social Economic Database (TSED) at www.tsed.org. This is complemented by an environment statistics publication that incorporates poverty and environment indicators collected from across sectors. PEI has further supported initial efforts by the National Bureau of statistics to carry out its institutional coordination role in feeding environmental statistics from various institutions into TSED. However, this remains a critical area for attention and capacity development.
In 2010, PEI supported the development of the new MKUKUTA (2011-2015) and the review of the MKUKUTA monitoring system with an emphasis on linking environmental sustainability and climate change adaptation to growth and poverty reduction. As a result, MKUKUTA II includes 3 out of 5 goals on environmental sustainability in its growth and poverty reduction priorities. The proposed MKUKUTA monitoring framework also includes 73 indicators of which 15 are related to poverty and environment. The lesson learned from PEI engagement with Poverty and Environment indicators reveals the need for long term engagement in the entire monitoring and reporting cycle including institutional capacity development support to the coordination and reporting of environmental statistics. This includes for the for the national bureau of statistics the has the overall mandate for ensuring data availability and access as well as participating institutions and agencies responsible for reporting on composite indicators. It also highlights the importance of using simpler poverty and environment indicators rather than complex indicators which require specific data which is not collected at regular intervals.