Participation in the Preparation of the Poverty Reduction and Economic Growth Program in Georgia

What was the impact of public participation in the preparation of the strategy?

How the civil society inputs were reflected in the strategy paper itself?

There have been a lot of discussions and description of the participation process. However it is more important to visualize how the public participation enabled the civil society representatives to influence the policy making. Since the final version of the Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Program of Georgia (EDPRP) has been published, it is right time to look back and highlight the key components of the strategy where civil society's inputs were the most significant.

There is a brief summary of the influence of public participation on the content of the strategy:

	The structure and principles of formulating the strategy changed (after the distribution of the Discussion Materials): from sectoral to problem/objective oriented strategy.
	Problem analysis (i.e. Poverty diagnosis) was redone through up to 13 public debates with the participation of government officials (sub-committee representatives) – outputs of these interventions of NGOs can be viewed on the web site   – cause-result relationship schemes out of which two were incorporated in the document (see Annex #7 and #8)
	Section 2.2 – Fundamental Principles of the Program had been suggested by NGOs and was developed through consultation process with the Secretariat & Sub-committees (mostly within the Editorial Board)
	Majority of strategy options were formulated by civil society representatives and were taken to Sub-committees for discussion (using Technical Workshops) and setting priorities (Section 2.3 Program Goal and Objectives)
	Section 2.4 “General approaches” was also suggested by NGOs and after discussion with the Secretariat & Sub-Committees was accepted and incorporated in the paper by the Editorial Board
	Sections 3.4 (Human capital development) and 3.5  (Risk management and Security) was initially developed and suggested by NGOs and was finalized through intensive discussions with the relevant governmental agencies (Sub-committee)
	More than 300 community based organizations (CBOs) provided inputs in selection of policy options regarding thee issues: Social assistance Employment/Labor market Community participation in the implementation of the PREGP
	Initial version of the Chapter 5 – Implementation of the Program and Public participation was developed by civil society representatives (mostly sections 5.3 on monitoring and evaluation and 5.4 Public participation) and was finalized through intensive consultation process first with the Government (by Editorial Board) and later with the donor community (through series of working meetings of NGO, the government and donor representatives).
	NGOs inputs were reflected in the development M&E Indicator matrix (Annex 2 and 3)