The main poverty reduction programme of the International Monetary Fund has "fallen short of potential" in improving conditions in the world's poorest countries, an independent report said on Wednesday.
The agency's Independent Evaluation Office, which operates independently of IMF management, gave a lukewarm assessment of the plan launched in 1999 by the IMF and World Bank to improve conditions in impoverished nations in Africa and elsewhere.
The study addressed the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP) prepared by the countries and the IMF's lending programme to support this strategy known as the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF).
The programme "has significant potential, but achievements to date have fallen short of potential, particularly in the areas of relevance to the IMF," the study concluded.
It added that the IMF funding for the programme has produced varied results in different countries "but has generally fallen short of the ambitious expectations set out in the original policy documents."
Problems with the approach included a "failure to address controversial policy issues as well as the absence of clear benchmarks against which to monitor progress."
The report called for greater flexibility in the programme "to accommodate the diversity of country political and administrative systems and constraints."
It also called for "enhancing the 'results-orientation' of the approach to allow countries to define - in a manner open to public scrutiny - their own benchmarks and objectives for improving policy-making processes."
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