50 Years Is Enough has joined with 1000 civil society organizations worldwide to support the launching of the Structural Adjustment Participatory Review Initiative (SAPRI), an initiative of citizens' organizations in conjunction with the World Bank and governments to assess — through gender inclusive, participatory processes — the impact of structural adjustment programs (SAPs). Officially launched in Washington on 14 July 1997, the purpose of SAPRI is to identify and set the stage for appropriate changes in adjustment operations and programs and for more participatory and effective economic-policymaking processes.

SAPRI was born in the early days of the Wolfensohn presidency out of a meeting with a group of U.S. and international NGOs led by the Washington-based Development GAP. At that meeting, NGOs proposed that the Bank undertake a bottom-up review of adjustment programs in conjunction with local organizations. Wolfensohn accepted the challenge and NGO leaders and Bank officials began to work out the details of the exercise. Two years later, significant progress has been made, though many details are still being worked out.

To date, eight countries are part of the official SAPRI process (Ghana, Mali, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Hungary, Ecuador, El Salvador and Bangladesh). The program is directed by an international steering committee with 2/3rds Southern country representation. Each national investigation will commence with a public forum where adjustment-related issues will be discussed and problem areas identified. These will be investigated by a civil-society/Bank team through field work that will rely primarily on participatory and gender-inclusive techniques designed to take into account qualitative, as well as quantitative, information. The field findings will be presented, discussed and assessed at a follow-up forum in each country and concrete actions related to changes in national adjustment programs, the opening of the adjustment-planning process to broad local participation, and modifications in the Bank's own adjustment-planning instruments will be determined. These findings and agreed-upon actions from each of the country exercises will then be presented at a major forum in Washington.

The process has not been without problems. For example, the SAPRI civil-society Network Steering Committee has expressed its displeasure to the World Bank over the fact that the institution has been unsuccessful in engaging large emerging-market economies (such as Mexico and the Philippines, where there is also strong civil-society interest in SAPRI) in the Initiative, despite the fact that they have received billions of dollars in adjustment-related lending from the Bank and are used as models for other countries to follow. Even more disturbing is that the Bank has refused to even solicit government cooperation in other countries, including Argentina, which, like Mexico, have implemented an economic program that has had a disastrous impact on most of its population. In each of the aforementioned "excluded" countries, citizens' organizations are considering moving ahead with a SAPRI-like exercise, extending an invitation to the government and the World Bank to join the process. The SAPRI Network (SAPRIN) is supporting these initiatives, as well.

Despite the new openings for dialogue that SAPRI — as well as the ever-broadening public challenges to SAPs— has created, the civil-society organizations involved in SAPRI are not naive about the possibilities of the exercise resulting in a change in the World Bank's fundamental economic policies. In fact, it is not lost on anyone that, while the Bank uses SAPRI to demonstrate that it is doing something on the adjustment issue with its critics and civil society generally, it is considering TIGHTENING the adjustment noose around the necks of borrower governments. If SAPRI does achieve its goal of creating greater flexibility for governments to respond to the knowledge and priorities of their own people — and significant change in the reform agenda does emerge from the exercise — it will be an important victory. But, as SAPRI progresses, participating groups are seeing that its greatest value may prove to be the breaking down of barriers that have traditionally divided civil society and the building, on the national and international level, of large, powerful coalitions demanding popular participation in the making of just economic policies.

For more information visit the SAPRIN web site:

www.igc.org/dgap/saprin

The Development GAP
927 15th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20005
Tel: 202/898-1566