PRSPs are national documents, which indicate for IDA borrowers their country’s poverty levels, identify poverty alleviation objectives, and propose a programme to meet these objectives through appropriate political and financial backing.

According to the IMF and the World Bank - the organizations that initiated this approach in 1999 - a PRSP should assure that a country’s macroeconomic, structural and social policies, match the objectives for poverty alleviation and social development.

PRSPs are key tools to reach Millennium Development Goals and have become important reference documents. Today the vast majority of donors use it as the basis for their country’ assistance strategies.

The absence, in PRSP, of specific mention of Livestock would reduce the sector’s actual and potential contribution to poverty reduction and allows sector-related vulnerability and risk to go largely unchecked.

All national PRSP are available on the World Bank website.

• Poverty and Livestock

Livestock sector significantly contributes to poor peoples livelihoods:

- at the macroeconomic level, livestock represents more than 27% of total agricultural GDP for Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA),  
- it constitutes an employment and revenue source for about 27% of SSA population,
- it allows poor landless people to generate revenue from common resources,
- beyond quantitative aspects (food security), it assures to population a balance alimentation, providing essential nutrients for human tissue constitution (amino-acid, vitamins),
- it's an important means of saving in countries where bank system is not reliable,
- eventually, livestock constitutes an important way to increase crops yields (draught power and manure) and to give value to by-products.

However a recent review of PRSPs in Sub-Saharan Africa shows that the livestock sector has been generally overlooked.

Download this review done by Pro-Poor Livestock Policy Initiative on the FAO website (Working paper 1).