The Poverty-Environment Initiative (PEI) of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is a global programme that supports country-led efforts to mainstream poverty-environment objectives into national development and sub-national development planning, from policy-making to budgeting, implementation and monitoring. With both financial and technical support, PEI assists government decision-makers and a wide range of other stakeholders to manage the environment in a way that improves livelihoods, reduces poverty, inequalities and leads to sustainable growth. The PEI works with key government partners to raise awareness, influence policy-making and strengthen the mainstreaming of poverty and environment into budget processes, sector programmes and sub-national planning. The overall aim is to bring about lasting institutional change and to catalyse key actors to increase investment in pro-poor environmental and natural resource management.
PEI Africa supports nine countries across the region based on demand Botswana, Burkina Faso,Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Rwanda and Tanzania. The country team’s are supported by the Africa Team based at the UN Environment HQ in Nairobi. The function of the team is to provide strategic direction to the PEI Africa Programme; provide technical advisory support to governments and UNDP country offices to facilitate PEI implementation; to assist country teams in monitoring and reporting progress and to promote the sharing of knowledge and lessons learnt from the different countries in the programme.
Key Achievements:
PEI Africa has significantly contributed by developing:
- 12 national level policies and development plans in nine PEI countries integrate poverty-environment objectives and targets.
- 35 Subnational development plans in four countries integrate poverty-environment objectives and targets.
- 47 Sectoral policies and plans in seven countries Integrate poverty-environment objectives.
- 12 budget processes include P-E guidelines & four countries have increased public resource allocations for the implementation of poverty-environment activities.
Poverty-Environment Initiative (PEI) Africa has further:
- Successfully clarified poverty-environment mainstreaming as a normative concept and developed it into an operational model that is technically robust and politically acceptable.
- Significantly improved understanding of how sustainability can help achieve development goals.
- Partially operationalized sustainability objectives through increased budgetary allocations for environmental sustainability.
- Successfully demonstrated the most comprehensive example of joint programming between UNDP and UN Environment reflecting ONE-UN reform in action.
