Ethiopia - Poverty Reduction Support Loan I

The Poverty Reduction Support Loan (PRSL) was approved by the Bank Group in May 2004 in support of Ethiopia’s Sustainable Development and Poverty Reduction Programme (SDPRP). The PRSL was designed as a single-tranche direct budget support operation to the 2004/05 budget to complement similar funding from other donors, including the IMF, World Bank, EU, DFID, CIDA, SIDA, Ireland and Germany. It was prepared and appraised in close coordination with these participating donors. It also adopted best practices namely, joint missions, a common performance assessment matrix, joint review and a common reporting system. These factors contributed to the technical soundness of programme design. The strong commitment of the programme to the reforms, focus on capacity building and the shift towards performance based management systems helped to promote programme sustainability.