Local Development Programme

Timeframe: 1990 - ongoing

Implemented by United Nations Capital Development Fund

A Local Development Programme (LDP) is a generic term for a local programming strategy or a comprehensive strategic tool. Successfully piloted by UNCDF in more than 25 countries (mainly in Africa), it has had substantial impact not only on local service delivery and capacities and poverty reduction, but also on national policies.

The aims of the LDP strategy in ‘building local capacities’ is:

• To develop improved procedures and systems (e.g. for a comprehensive and holistic local planning/budgeting) to be managed by local bodies and thereby to enhance the pro-poor delivery performance of those bodies;

• To introduce these alongside real budgetary resources, allowing real time learning-by-doing.

The aim of the LDP is to demonstrate that sound institutional arrangements, together with increased opportunities for better economic performance and sustainable rural livelihoods, may empower the poor, strengthen their participation in local political life and decision-making, reduce poverty, and foster economic growth.

An LDP has four distinct features:

• Sub-national institutional focus: Supporting the institutional development of subnational government and community institutions and of their inter-relations, in a selected area.

• Innovation in practice and procedures: Improving procedures and practices for local planning and budgeting, procurement, implementation, management and monitoring and – overall – for the enhancement the effectiveness, efficiency and accountability of local bodies in poverty reduction-related activities (mainly through the provision of infrastructure services and the management of natural resources).

• Performance-linked funding facility: Providing local governments with a development budget support facility allowing regular, transparent and sustainable allocations to local bodies and tied to agreed measures of local performance, as incentive for local capacity building.

• Policy impact: Agreeing to ‘pilot’ activities which are ‘policy-relevant’, and which can be scaled-up, working as far as possible through statutory bodies and procedures (rather than creating parallel structures), to assist both the reform and the implementation of national policy in decentralization and local governance, fiscal decentralization and local service delivery, and local public sector.

For further information on implemenitng of the LDP click here.