Freetown — Sierra Leone has produced development strategies at three levels. In the short term, and in principle completed, is Sierra Leone's National Recovery Strategy. Strategies in the short to medium term are the national PRSP, the Public Investment Programmes (PIPs) and Sierra Leone's Medium-Term Expenditure Framework. Strategies for the long term are developed especially in Sierra Leone's Vision 2025 document.

The National Recovery Strategy document makes no mention of the Millennium Development Goals, except to emphasize that the goals need to be addressed in the PRSP. The Vision 2025 document, offers to set "the long-term direction for Sierra Leone and [aims] to provide a sense of purpose and directions for the development management process in Sierra Leone." But again it makes no explicit mention of the MDGs. The Vision 2025 document is itself in a sense a bigger project than the Millennium Development Goals. Whereas the MDGs focus especially on basic human needs such as health and education and freedom from hunger and poverty, the Vision 2025 focuses on the overall state of the country, as captured by the more general goal of a "Sweet-Salone" - a "United People, Progressive Nation, Attractive Country." The Interim PRSP report makes no mention of the goals, nor does the status report on the preparatory activities for the full Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper of September 2003. The December 2004 ("final") draft, of the PRSP does however make explicit mention of the role of the MDGs in Sierra Leone's development strategy.

A number of features stand out from our enquiries: • Although sensitization initiatives have been launched, there is little knowledge about the MDGs in Sierra Leone and little recognition of their strategic importance for the country.

This is in part due to the fact that the goals have not been presented as a declaration of rights for individual Sierra Leoneans - for example as a statement of the commitment to children that they can complete primary education - but instead are presented as just one more in a series of international expressions of goodwill. The failure to communicate the rights aspect of the Millennium Goals can be attributed at least in part to the documentation supplied by the UNDP head office in New York to facilitate sensitization campaigns.

• The MDGs are conceived as external to Sierra Leone: rather than being seen as part of an agreement into which Sierra Leone entered as a sovereign nation, the MDGs are conceived of as being designed and pushed from the outside. In fact, that the MDGs are international goals (agreed to by Sierra Leone) is what makes them a powerful lobbying tool for the country. Furthermore, although the goals themselves are part of an international process, the identification of optimal strategies for meeting the goals will have to be developed largely through consultative processes in-country.

• Although there is a description in the PRSP of how the PRSP relates to the MDGs, the linkages between these as are presently largely formal. The PRSP describes itself as "the first big, conscious step" towards meeting the goals. But the most common view expressed by government officials in Sierra Leone was that the PRSP process pushed the MDGs off the agenda. In fact the PRSP should be seen as a strategy designed explicitly to meet the goals. While an analysis of the PRSP does admit a very strong consistency between the PRSP and the MDGs, the PRSP does not describe whether the targets set in the PRSP for 2005-2007 are sufficiently ambitious to place the country on track to meet the MDGs; in other words, these short term targets appear not to have been calibrated in order to meet the MDGs.

• The PRSP provides benchmarks for 2005, 2006 an 2007; it provides a costing of strategies and it estimates the financing gap that exists for meeting these strategies. This helps to turn the PRSP into a useful basis for negotiating with the donor community with respect to aid and debt. Furthermore, the task of aligning the PRSP with the MDGs will not be as difficult as elsewhere and the preparatory work for the PRSP will continue to be useful in helping align the PRSP with the MDGs. In linking the present benchmarks to an MDG strategy the tools that have been developed by the Millennium Project will be useful but at present these appear not to be known in Sierra Leone and were not employed to produce the present costings.

The article is an excerpt of a research work titled: Prospects and Opportunities for Achieving the MDGs in Post-conflict Countries: 'A Case Study of Sierra Leone and Liberia,' done by Macartan Humphreys, Assistant Professor Department of Political Science, Columbia University and Professor Paul Richards, TAO Chairgroup, Wageningen University in The Netherlands