Government has allocated a total of $105million for poverty alleviation projects, reveals the Permanent Secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office, Lt-Col Pio Tikoduadua.
He made the remarks whilst opening the Introductory Workshop on Impact Evaluation organized by the Poverty Eradication Unit under the Prime Minister’s Office in Suva today (20/04/2010).
“It is difficult really to measure the impact of all this assistance that Government is providing to the people. We also have measures of poverty alleviation that the international community looks to Fiji to perform and again this is very hard for us to measure,” Lt-Col Tikoduadua said.
The Permanent Secretary added that the reason it was difficult to measure the extent of poverty in Fiji was because there had been no impact study conducted. This he said was the reason why the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) was in Fiji.
“He (Dr Howard White, the Executive Director of 3ie) is here for a few days and he heads back to New Delhi but they will be back sometime later. The plan is they are going to come back and team up with Government to look at the impact of poverty in Fiji and across the government spectrum.”
Lt-Col Tikoduadua said that the workshop was to hear from Dr White and see how well the work they were going to do was going to impact on what Government does and how better to help Government eradicate poverty.
The half-day workshop was attended by various government representatives including Permanent Secretaries, Divisional Commissioners, City and Town Administrators and international organizations such as the Asian Development Bank, UNDP, AUSAID, International Labour Organization and UNIFEM. Local development partners such as Pacific Community Network and Save the Children Fund were also in attendance.