Brief Remarks

By Mr. Abdoulie Janneh
UN Under-Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa

May 21 - 22, 2006
Abuja, Nigeria,

at the African Ministerial Conference on Financing for Development, jointly organized by the Government of Nigeria, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), and the African Development Bank (ADB)

Your Excellency, Mrs. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Minister of Finance of Nigeria
Mr. Donald Kaberuka, President of the African Development
Dr. Maxwell Mkwezalamba, Representing the Chairperson of the African Union
Honourable Ministers
Members of the Diplomatic Corps
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Press
Ladies and Gentlemen:

Good Afternoon.

I would like to thank the Government of the Federal Republic of Nigeria for inviting ECA to partner with them and the African Development Bank on this very important meeting. I would also like to thank our development partners for their presence and participation. I would also like to use this opportunity to thank the Government and people of Nigeria for the hospitality shown me and my delegation since our arrival in this refreshingly beautiful city, Abuja, two days ago.

I would like to begin these brief remarks by applauding the decision of the President of Nigeria to convene a High-Level Ministerial Conference on this theme. Over the past several years, Nigeria has played a leading role in facilitating the emergence of African consensus on important international issues such as the AU Declaration on HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria, the Fertilizer initiative, and the Treaty of the African Economic Community. It is thus fitting that we should gather here in Abuja to proactively begin an engagement with an issue that is likely to dominate our agenda in the next several months – the management of additional financial resources that may soon become available to our countries to enable a scaling up efforts to meet the MDGs.

Two months ago, in Cairo, the African Ministerial Plenary on Poverty Reduction Strategies and the Millennium Development Goals jointly organized by ECA and the AU Commission in collaboration with the ADB in Cairo, Egypt, discussed issues congruent with those tabled for discussion at this Conference and made important recommendations. One of those recommendations was that national development strategies should be sufficiently bold if African countries are to reach the MDG targets by 2015. This meeting is thus very timely and we do see it as an appropriate follow-up by Africa of the 2005 World Summit.

Ladies and Gentlemen:

We have just come from Ouagadougou where issues that intersect with the theme of this Conference were discussed. Our ECA Conference of Ministers of Finance was on the theme of employment. As we know, Africa’s recent good growth performance has not translated into faster rate of job creation partly because growth is concentrated in the enclave minerals sector and partly because sectors such as agriculture are not growing at a rate that we would like due to inadequate financial resources to provide complimentary inputs.

The joint ECA/ADB Symposium focused on Infrastructure for regional integration - a very important matter because obstacles to growth and poverty reduction have a regional dimension not only because many of our countries are landlocked but also because market fragmentation, as well as conflicts and infectious diseases limit competitiveness This explains why regional integration is one of the objectives of the AU’s NEPAD programme. Without, the goal of creating an African Economic Community (AEC) will not be realized.

Financing is implicated in the two themes discussed in Ouagadougou. We need additional financing – and new institutional arrangements - to provide regional public goods in order to promote regional integration. We need additional financing to diversify our economies in order to have broad-based growth that creates jobs.

So, it is clear to all of us that financing, in addition to strong political will and capacity, is important for the speed at which Africa makes progress towards the targets of the MDGs. This is yet another reason why this Conference is very timely.

Fortunately, Africa has recently seen increased willingness on the part of our development partners to support her efforts with additional resources. In Monterrey, at the UN Conference on Financing for Development, the industrialized countries made a commitment to meet the earlier commitment of raising overseas development assistance to 0.7% of gross national income. Since Monterrey, additional commitments have been made, for example at the Gleneagles G-8 Summit. The debt write-off of the Multi-lateral debt relief initiative is an example of this increased willingness.

Ladies and Gentlemen:

Increased aid flows will require us to up the effectiveness and efficiency of many of our systems and the way we do many things. New capacities will need to be built and national development strategies will have to be better costed. Africa and the development partners will also have to develop new skills and instruments to better manage their relationship. For example, the first reaction of development partners to perceived “difficulties” on the African side should not be to suspend aid since such a response very often imperils successes already achieved.

On their own part, African countries must intensify domestic resource mobilization. It is impossible for African countries to get the policy and fiscal spaces that they are asking for if they continue to depend so perilously on external assistance. Indeed, an intensified domestic resources mobilization effort can be a signaling device – a signal to development partners of African governments’ seriousness to scale up their own efforts to reach the targets of the MDG.

Ladies and Gentlemen:

I would like to conclude these brief remarks by addressing us to some of the recommendations of the “African Ministerial Plenary on Poverty Reduction Strategies and the Millennium Development Goal” in Cairo, in March, which focused principally on second-generation poverty reduction strategies because they are pertinent for this Conference. In Cairo, African Ministers concluded that future national development plans in African countries must be bold enough to achieve the MDGs sooner than 2015. The Plenary also underscored the importance of strong statistics and statistical systems for effective monitoring and decision-making. Given Africa’s enormous development needs, the Plenary further agreed that increased aid flows to Africa is needed and urgently so and that we need to improve the effectiveness of aid. The volume of aid needs to increase, aid must be predictable, and the gap between commitment and disbursement must be closed.

It is thus important for Africa’s development partners to improve the harmonization and coherence of their policies and programmes to ensure better alignment with the identified priorities of African countries. Mutual responsibility and mutual accountability must undergird the aid relationship. Partners must facilitate by greater market openness since. ECA and OECD/DAC have been working on the issue of mutual accountability in the past several years and it is our intention to share the results of this joint work with member States and the wider international community in order to raise awareness of the need for the widespread adoption of this principle.

The African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) of the AU, whose objective is to monitor governance in Africa, is an important instrument for mutual accountability on the African side. Recent APRM reports document substantial progress by Peer-reviewed countries in all areas of governance – economic, political, corporate and social - and the enormous additional financing needed to sustain progress and to make progress in other areas. For Ghana, according to the President, additional financing is in the neighbourhood of $5billion to enable his country bridge the identified gaps in the review process.

The Cairo Plenary also recommended, congruent with the purpose of this meeting, that ECA should revitalize its African Learning Group on Poverty Reduction Strategies; its remit should be expanded and the LG itself remodelled into an effective Peer Learning activity on PRS and MDGs. ECA is committed to doing that.

In conclusion, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is my hope is that we will rise from this meeting with a short list of actionable recommendations on how to ensure that the noble commitments of the international community to assist Africa are met and that Africa on her part keeps to her part of the bargain.

Thank you very much for listening. I wish us all fruitful deliberations.