Contents

The Case for Partnership

Part I A Renewed ECA

1. Paving the Way
2. Implementing the New Agenda
3. Management Changes to Enable ECA's New Work
   
   

Part II Proposals for Partnership

1. Overview of Proposals
2. Accelerating Africa's Fight Against Poverty
3. Expanding African Trade and Promoting International Competitiveness
4. Addressing Africa's Urgent Nexus: Food, Population, Environment
5. Building Africa's Capacity for Science and Technology
6. Strengthening African Civil Society for Development and Peace
7. Reviving Private Investment in Africa
8. Mobilizing Africa's Capital Markets
9. Building the African Information Society
10. Promoting Statistics Development in Africa
11. Linking African States Through Efficient, Reliable Transportation Systems
12. Fostering Leadership and Empowerment for Women in Africa
13. Networking to Provide Economic and Social Policy Advice in Africa
14. Advancing South-South Cooperation
15. Upgrading ECA Capacity in Information and Communications Technology
16. Increasing ECA Capacity Through Staff Training
17. Communicating Information About African Development
18. Engaging the Public Through the Mass Media
19.  
20. 
    
    

Annexes

A. Consultative Planning Meeting, January 1996

B. Profiles: ECA's Senior Management Team

Tables

1. Arriving at a Diagnosis, mid-1995-early 1996
2. Arriving at a Prescription, September 1995-May 1996
3. ECA's Major Work, 1997-2001

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The Case for Partnership

Exceptional times call for exceptional responses. After a period of unprecedented decline, Africa's development prospects now appear brighter than at any time since the decade of independence. A new generation of leaders has absorbed the lessons of the past and is boldly moving ahead with reforms, liberalization of economies, and discipline in management. In 1995, more than half the nations of Africa enjoyed real GDP growth in excess of their population growth. At least a third of these countries recorded growth rates of 6 percent and above in 1995, and only three countries experienced negative growth compared to fourteen countries the year before. Even Africa's terms of trade are showing modest improvement. Furthermore, most African states are more determined than ever to settle conflicts peaceably. Intellectual and programme strengths abound on the continent.

As a result, hope is growing that Africa now has a distinct opportunity to meet basic human needs and sharply reduce poverty in an environment of economic growth. Thus, one can foresee a future in our children's lifetimes where, at the very least, universal basic education and health services are available and enterprises flourish. Already, the middle class is increasing, governance is more responsible and pluralistic, and cooperation among African nations is beginning to yield reciprocal gains.

The course towards such a new world is by no means certain. The challenges to delivering sound economic management, implementing equitable public policies, reducing pressures on the environment, coping with food and water insecurities, and ameliorating fragile ethnic relations are among serious issues confronting Africa as we head into the 21st century.

As Africa's development teeters between the forces of progress and the forces of fracture, timing is critical. To prepare itself to be effective in this time of decision, the Economic Commission for Africa recently completed a systematic, year-long assessment (mid-1995 to mid-1996) of its strengths and weaknesses. In the process, ECA was willing to put everything on the table-substantive work programmes and management systems alike.

The assessment enabled ECA to identify how it must change and what it must do during the next few years to help accelerate Africa's socio-economic development. As a result, ECA is being reshaped to anticipate opportunities, rather than merely react to events. To this end, the substantive and management reforms ECA is undertaking are systematic and extensive, yet daring. Re-engineering is well underway.

Of course, ECA is not starting from scratch. Over the forty years since its founding, the Commission has made major contributions to Africa's development. It proposed the African Development Bank, fostered subregional organizations, and, in recent years, assumed fundamental responsibilities in regional trade, monetary relations, and informatics.

This prospectus covers some of Africa's most critical development challenges and opportunities: designing and implementing economic and social policies to alleviate poverty; expanding inter-regional trade and integrating Africa into the world economy; enhancing the capacity of the state for development and promoting a prominent role for the private sector; strengthening civil society organizations for development and peace; promoting gender equity; and promoting policies that expedite the use of information technology in Africa's development.

Ultimately, successful African development will require African nations and institutions to implement African solutions to problems of the continent. To carry out its mandate to support economic and social development in Africa, ECA must have the capacity to develop and disseminate credible options, advocate positions, and forge consensus on key issues. Most important, ECA, working in concert with other development entities, must serve as a networker of African talent and a clearing-house of development information.

We are, therefore, putting in place new operational practices that will put ECA in a position to be a networker of development expertise on Africa. We will actively seek out relationships and network with regional centres of policy expertise, research and policy institutions in Member States, individual experts on Africa, and centres of excellence outside the continent that concentrate on African development. We will also serve as a clearing-house for best practices and development information.

In summary, we see our role on the continent as that of a catalyst for ideas, action, and capacity-building. Additionally, we will be able to use the ECA-managed networks and fora for advocating common positions on development policies and issues to policy-makers.

The Commission has also revamped its work programme to serve Africa better. We are committed to ensuring that ECA's work is policy relevant and at the cutting edge of Africa's development agenda, determining ECA's comparative advantage and making sure that our organization does not perform work that other institutions are better placed or equipped to deliver, seeking specific synergies between programmes to reinforce results, and finally ensuring technical competence and excellence in ECA's output that assures high professional standards and high-quality products.

To concentrate its resources on critical issues, the Commission is setting priorities for its activities and operations. For example, over the next three years, ECA is devoting 60 percent of its budget to three areas of Africa's development:

• Promoting regional cooperation and integration.
• Enhancing the contribution of women to economic development.
• Utilizing advances in information technology and knowledge for development.

How can ECA reach these high standards, especially given the financial constraints that the United Nations Secretariat is currently facing? The answer is through strategic focus, internal reform, and partnership.

We are, therefore, seeking synergies with African intergovernmental organizations, UN bodies and specialized agencies, donor countries, African universities, research centres, and civil society groups. The partnerships will vary, depending on organizational resources. Most of the collaborations will involve research, advisory services, sponsorship of seminars and workshops, data exchange, advocacy, and assistance in ECA's capacity-building through fellowships, internships, and lectureships and support of jointly agreed-on research.

What does ECA bring to its partnership arrangements? ECA is uniquely qualified to serve Africa. With our multi-disciplinary and multi-sectoral character, the Commission can serve as a vital bridge between Africa's states and their development partners. Privileged to be the only United Nations organization with specific responsibility for the African region, we are able to gain political support, financial support, and credibility from African countries and for African countries.

ECA needs partners to further maximize the impact that we can make collectively on Africa. In these times of declining resources for development assistance, pooling efforts and coordinating diverse activities is a cost-effective approach to our respective missions and ultimately will be better for Africa. Where there is a duplication of effort, there are missed opportunities. Shared aims and commitment can only enhance the quality, importance, and excitement of the projects and programmes for the continent.

ECA is ready to work with development partners to coordinate agenda-setting and development activities for Africa. Additionally, we now have the benefit of our full-service, multi-purpose, state-of-the-art United Nations Conference Centre, an ideal venue for conferences, seminars, and meetings of up to 1,500 people.

ECA will carry out much of its new work through partnerships. This prospectus addresses a number of starting points for discussion with prospective partners. Part I, chapter 1, provides an overview of ECA's new strategic directions and their origins. Chapter 2 lays out ECA's new programme and the guiding principles that underlie the activities of the programme. Chapter 3 details the significant organizational realignment that reflects ECA's new focus and the more effective deployment of administrative and staff skills.

The various proposals for partnership appear in part II. They verify what ECA is promising: serious renewal, effective consultation with partners, a clearly defined course, a commitment to selectivity, and expert management. ECA believes that the services and products described in the proposals are well within the capability of ECA and its partners to deliver.

This is a critical time for the future of Africa. Fortunately, many multi-talented thinkers and doers are ready to work with us. Not tapping such diverse capabilities at this crucial point in Africa's history would mean missing out on burgeoning opportunities for the region. Africa's commitment to reform, however, can last only as long as there is evidence of solid progress on the continent.

ECA and its partners can make a difference. The time is right, the ideas are fresh, and the potential for partnership is real.

Join Us

By undertaking a significant organizational realignment to reflect its revived focus and more effective deployment of administrative and staff skills, ECA is now ready to work with you. Join us in one or more of the seventeen proposals for partnership laid out in part II.

• Together we can jointly identify and approach challenges facing African nations.
• Together we can exchange ideas.
• Together we can move forward on key issues stymied at the political level.
• Together we can strengthen cohesiveness at a time when Africa feels marginalized and divided.
• Together we can multiply human resources for tackling development issues and utilize the depth of talent in Africa.

For a better appreciation of the new ECA, we encourage your review of the entire prospectus. Whether you choose to collaborate with ECA by selecting an element of a proposal, or providing full support for a proposal, or alternatively, giving general institutional support for capacity-building, I encourage your interest in the functioning of the total Commission.

Thank you for your interest in partnering with ECA for the future of Africa. I look forward to follow-up discussions with you.

UN Under Secretary General and

Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa

Organization Abbreviations

PART I

A Renewed ECA

Paving the Way

This prospectus lays out the renewal of the Economic Commission for Africa, creating a framework for strong alliances between ECA and its development partners for Africa. The Commission arrived at this approach after conducting a carefully designed set of integrated studies and consultations from mid-1995 to mid-1996 (tables 1 and 2) that strongly support a reformed ECA.

At the heart of this careful diagnosis of ECA and the resulting prescription for renewal was the development, review, and validation of proposed strategic directions for ECA's work through the studies and consultations. The goal was to define ECA objectives to promote Africa's future, sharpen the focus of ECA activities, and assure that objectives are achieved.

This prospectus carries the process a step further: It translates the strategic directions reached by consensus of subject-matter experts and policy-makers into specific programmes for implementation. Reinforced by a series of internal management reforms, the Commission aims to carry out this work under three overriding considerations: excellence, cost-effectiveness, and partnership.

A Brief Look at ECA

Established in 1958, ECA is one of five regional economic commissions under the administrative direction of the United Nations Headquarters. Each commission operates in response to regional needs. Its Member States match those of the Organization of African Unity. In the OAU, the fifty-three African nations are represented by their ministers of foreign affairs. At ECA, they are represented by their ministers of finance and planning. The Commission also works with several other ministerial groupings, including those concerned with social development, transportation, gender, and trade.

Table 1

Table 2

Thus, ECA has ready access to all aspects of African governments concerned with development.

As of December 1996, the Commission had a staff of 300 professionals with a wide range of expertise, and a general support and field service staff, for a total complement of 800. Funding and support come from the regular budget and extra-budgetary resources. The regular budget is voted for biennally by the General Assembly of the United Nations. The extra-budgetary resources are those that the ECA negotiates with Africa's bilateral and multilateral partners, including UN agencies and programmes. The regular budget for the 1996-1997 biennium amounts to US $92,122,400; extra-budgetary resources for the biennium were US $9,548,300.

Over the years, the Commission has been asked by its Conference of Ministers to work in numerous fields, and has achieved a number of regional agreements, most recently in informatics. Nevertheless, it became clear by 1995 that ECA was frequently neglecting to focus on key issues. With its work spread too thinly, the Commission sometimes was missing critical development issues and opportunities in Africa. Moreover, ECA was not keeping pace with revolutionary advances in technology. This lack of strategic direction made the Commission's work less coherent and less effective than it could have been, which in turn made the Commission less attractive to potential partners.

As a result of this general assessment, the Commission began an intensive review of its policies, programmes, and staff in July 1995. To gain vital insight into the ECA staff's perspectives on its work, the Commission's first step was to hold more than seventy 'open space' meetings. Foremost at these meetings was the examination by staff of ECA's past work and the way the staff envisioned the Commission's role in meeting Africa's challenges in the 21st century. Staff also discussed administrative and personnel processes and systems; planning, programming, and budgeting systems; technical capacity of the professional staff; and Commission communications, publications, and dissemination strategies. These meetings resulted in the comprehensive document, Serving Africa Better: Strategic Directions for the Economic Commission for Africa.

With this document as a framework, ECA held a consultative meeting in January 1996 with more than fifty high-level African experts from government, the private sector, academia, NGOs, and civil society (annex A). These African experts were asked to offer guidance on implementing the vision, specifically:

• Examining ways to capitalize on those current activities of the Commission that were important and deserved to be fostered.
• Identifying new areas of concentration that could provide real services to Member States that were not being provided elsewhere.
• Considering who would partner with ECA to achieve its goals, and the nature of these partnerships.

A second consultative meeting, this time with organizations who have collaborated with ECA or are potential collaborators, took place in April 1996. This Partners Meeting was attended by representatives from twenty-nine countries and organizations. (See page 7.)

During three days of deliberations, attendees worked intensively with ECA staff on honing renewal plans and providing information, perspective, and offers of collaboration. Through this wide-ranging process, ECA identified its comparative strengths, modalities, and markets. The Commission also defined a business strategy that ensures ECA's full participation in Africa's development agenda without performing the work that other institutions are better placed or better equipped to deliver, and reinforces standards of excellence for technical competence and outputs. To reflect its new, overall goals, the Commission set forth the target areas for implementing five core programmes:

Facilitating Economic and Social Policy Analysis.ECA will gather and synthesize available information on Africa, analyse policies in critical sectors, particularly on long-term issues, and then disseminate information throughout Africa on successful development models and best practises. ECA will use partnerships and networking to draw on the work of other development organizations and serve as a catalyst for development efforts of Member States, focusing on multi-country strategies and addressing issues of regional dimension.

Economic policy analyses conducted by ECA will focus on macro and international economic priorities-fiscal and monetary management, open trade and investment policies, liberalization of financial markets, and regional integration. ECA will work with African countries to articulate common propositions on international negotiations, provide assistance with debt reduction and coping with post-Uruguay Round trade issues, and identify ways to seize the advantages of globalization.

Social policy analyses will focus on promoting social and legal equity for women, furthering education efforts, monitoring poverty on the continent, and promoting effective strategies for poverty reduction.

Ensuring Food Security and Sustainable Development. The most compelling issue facing Africa is the nexus dynamic, that is, developing policies to mitigate the problems arising from the related areas of population expansion, declining per capita agricultural production, and increasing threats to the continent's fragile ecology. Africa is the only continent where agricultural production per capita has been declining steadily, and population and environmental degradation are increasing. This situation has resulted in greater food insecurity in Africa and undermined prospects for long-term sustainable development. Today, Africa is the only region where the number of poor-and hence the number facing food insecurity (now estimated as one-third of the continent's population)-is projected to continue rising.

ECA's actions in this core programme will include raising African policy-maker awareness of the urgency to integrate food, population, and environment concerns into development planning; building national and local capacity to manage nexus issues in the context of national development policies; encouraging attention of Member States on policies to accelerate agricultural productivity; and identifying and promoting the adoption of best practices in the three nexus areas.

Strengthening Development Management. The third core programme will focus on developing an efficient public sector and a robust private sector, enhancing popular participation in civil society, and addressing ways to enhance their individual and linked roles.

In public-sector management, ECA will promote good governance by encouraging systems that foster accountability and minimize corruption. Additionally, the Commission will foster civil service reform and promote decentralization and strengthening of local government. In private-sector development, ECA will assist governments to reform regulatory frameworks to improve market functioning, promote dialogue between government and business, and collaborate to foster micro credit that can strengthen the information sector and micro enterprise.

ECA will augment its already-active role in promoting development through institutions of civil society by promoting collaboration between NGOs and UN organizations. ECA will establish a resource centre for NGOs and civil society organizations, and continue organizing and facilitating dialogue between civil society and governments. The centre will also provide training and technical assistance to build NGO capacity.

Harnessing Information for Development. If Africa does not embrace information and communications technology, the development gap between Africa and the rest of the world will widen even further. By entering the Information Age, Africa can exploit new technologies that the continent needs to participate fully in the global economy.

Harnessing information for development has been central to ECA work for a long time, and the Commission has taken a leading role in promoting electronic dissemination of information in Africa. In its last two sessions, the annual ECA Conference of Ministers adopted resolutions endorsing the African Information Society Initiative (AISI), an action framework for building an information and communication infrastructure in Africa. ECA was also tasked by all the partners involved with the initiative* with coordinating the implementation of AISI and the related 'Harnessing Information Technologies for Development' component of the UN System-wide Special Initiative on Africa. Implementation of these initiatives will strengthen ECA's advocacy role as it conducts policy workshops for African Member States on the importance of building the information society and the policy reforms necessary to make this happen, as well as effectively utilizing information and information technology to build the competitiveness of African economies and sound social systems.

Since national capacities for statistical data generation have seriously deteriorated in the past fifteen years, another priority in this core programme is rehabilitation of African statistical systems. ECA has a major role in assisting Member States to implement the Addis Ababa Plan of Action for Statistical Development. As a special effort, ECA will improve its own database to serve as a regional data services centre; no such regional database exists in Africa.

Promoting Regional Cooperation and Integration. This major mandate is at the centre of ECA's work. The Commission will foster efforts of Member States and assist in establishing and strengthening subregional organizations. ECA will make the economic case for regional integration through policy papers and advocacy. Potential gains from infrastructure and material-resources investment coordination in Africa will be emphasized. The Abuja Treaty will continue to be the major framework around which ECA will collaborate and integrate efforts with its Joint Secretariat partners, the Organization of African Unity and African Development Bank.

ECA is also decentralizing in order to strengthen subregional activities and staff. The Commission's Subregional Development Centres (SRDCs, formerly MULPOCs), located in each of Africa's five subregions, are being rationalized to provide more equitable geographic coverage and improve their functional relationships, especially with organizations such as the Economic Community of West Africa States (ECOWAS) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

The SRDCs will forge joint programmes and activities for the benefit of Member States, international governmental organizations, and non-governmental agencies. They will facilitate networking and information exchange among development agencies in their subregions, and provide links between these organizations and ECA, thereby helping disseminate the Commission's policy recommendations, information, and technical publications.

In addition, ECA's African Centre for Women (ACW) will devote its activities to a major cross-cutting concern, Fostering Leadership and Empowerment for Women in Africa. Its work will be mainstreamed throughout the Commission's programmes to help Member States improve the socio-economic conditions of women, enhance women's involvement and decision-making in development, and ensure that women and gender equity are key elements in national development. This cross-cutting theme is one of the ways ECA will promote implementation within Africa of the Global Platform of Action and its regional counterpart, the African Platform of Action.*

In support of all its work, ECA is

• Partnering with research and technical institutions in Africa and elsewhere so that ECA and the institution can strengthen the quality of each other's work.
• Partnering with international organizations to gain wider perspectives and strengths.
• Restructuring around five core issues to produce a less bureaucratic and more interactive ECA.
• Reforming ECA modalities for greater efficiency and impact.
• Cutting costs through numerous efficiency-producing reforms.
• Upgrading staff capabilities through intensive training, internships and fellowships, and new staff.
• Extending outreach through more sophisticated electronic communications systems.

The careful steps ECA took to arrive at this framework of activities, its dedication to correcting past deficiencies, and the depth of the renewal have been lauded. UN Headquarters and senior officials have also championed the proposed reforms. In his 1996 statement to the ECA Conference of Ministers, then-UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali said: 'ECA is in the vanguard of change and reform within the UN'.

Implementing the New Agenda

The international community is increasingly recognizing that Africa's basic policies must be developed and based in Africa. Although analyses by external parties are often crucial, nothing can stand in for a home-grown sense of ownership.

A major, established voice for Africa, heavily involved in development on both the continent and within the United Nations, the Economic Commission for Africa is well situated to help Africa achieve a better future. As the regional arm of the United Nations in Africa, ECA's primary responsibility is to carry out activities encouraging the growth of the economic and social sectors on the continent. At the same time, this instrument of the United Nations is also part of the network of African inter-governmental institutions and organizations that implement the various agendas for development adopted by Member States.

This dual role places the Commission in a special position. As a UN agency, it undertakes research and analysis on the common needs and priorities of African countries, and advocates mutual approaches that the states can take to tackle the socio-economic problems of the region.

As one of the regional bodies serving African states, the Commission is also uniquely placed to carry out particular kinds of work for individual governments; such work includes action-oriented research; information-gathering, -interpretation, and -dissemination; enhanced policy dialogue; training and other forms of capacity-building; and certain types of technical assistance, including short-term advisory services.

In fact, leading African development experts and potential bilateral, multilateral, and foundation partners have been urging the Commission to become a key indigenous institution, seeking solutions to development needs in cooperation with leaders throughout Africa and beyond. They know the changes ECA is pursuing, and they want those changes soon.

The sense of ownership and interest in the Economic Commission for Africa is strong on the continent. This is because ECA represents far more than its activities and its people.

• As a policy centre with a broad purview, ECA is in a prime position to analyse issues and advocate in conjunction with policy-makers in Africa and abroad.
• As a communications network, ECA promotes dialogue on key issues in Africa's development through conferences that bring together a spectrum of individuals and groups seeking common ground for action.
• As a builder of capacities in development management, ECA provides policy analysis, training, and advisory services to African states.
• As a consensus-builder, ECA facilitates the governmental processes in which African states define, articulate, and advocate common positions on development policies and issues.

ECA's Place Within the UN System

ECA plays a critical role in fostering development in Africa within the United Nations system. The Commission is in a position to help coordinate UN programmes and activities, bring synergies to the UN's work in Africa, mobilize resources in support of the continent, and sustain interest in Africa during a time of declining resources. The Commission derives its distinct comparative advantage within the United Nations family for promoting and supporting socio-economic development in Africa from the following attributes:

• Its multi-disciplinary operations capacity that covers a wide spectrum of development issues.
• Its access to policy-makers and opinion leaders for effective policy advocacy on critical development issues.
• Its ability to convene policy-makers and other stakeholders at the regional and subregional levels for holding dialogues, sharing common goals, and coordinating positions on major efforts.
• Its leadership in articulating positions on behalf of Africa in international fora.
• Its critical partnerships with the Organization for African Unity and the African Development Bank that allow the three institutions to identify and execute comprehensive strategies for Africa and bring about resolution and actions at the highest political levels.

n March 1996, by adopting the UN System-wide Special Initiative on Africa, the United Nations underscored both its commitment to Africa and its confidence in ECA as a regional institution, designating the Commission as a key agent in the coordination and implementation of this ten-year development plan. The Executive Secretary of ECA and the Administrator of UNDP are co-chairs of the initiative.

This initiative, the hallmark of cooperation between UN partners, provides a framework for the partners' commitment to Africa's development challenge by bolstering efforts in education, health, water supply, and food security. In this way, it brings focus to collaboration by UN partner agencies while utilizing the respective strengths of each agency to the best advantage. Priorities for the initiative were derived from the New UN Agenda for the Development of Africa and the Cairo Agenda for Relaunching Africa's Development.

With the World Bank leading resource-mobilization for the initiative, ECA will provide leadership in developing informatics in Africa, promoting the role of civil society in development and peacemaking, and fostering South-South cooperation to take advantage of the experiences and expertise of newly developed nations.

Under the auspices of the initiative, and building on past relationships, ECA plans to deepen its cooperation with UN-system partners. The following examples indicate the types of activities that are planned or already underway.

UNDP. UNDP's strong country presence and mandate to support and coordinate UN activities at the national level are highly complementary to the Commission's responsibility for promoting economic and social development. Through strengthened collaboration between ECA and UNDP at the country level, both organizations can provide effective support for the development of African countries. One area of growing opportunity for joint action is assisting Member States to formulate and implement Country Strategy Notes, a major tool for guiding the development efforts in Member States. UNDP utilization of ECA's multi-disciplinary professional staff, especially the regional advisors, will be another major area for collaboration. Working together to provide technical support at the country level will help to ensure the best-targeted and most cost-effective assistance.

The convergence between ECA's new strategic directions for 1997-2001 and UNDP's Fifth Inter-country Programme for 1997-2001 invites even stronger collaboration. The complementarities between the two organizations will be expanded in the areas of gender equity, private-sector development, Internet connectivity, trade promotion, and issues of governance.

UNFPA, FAO, and UNEP. ECA expects to collaborate with all three of these agencies to integrate and bring the nexus issues of food security, population, and the environment to the forefront of regional and national planning.

UNFPA has indicated readiness to support ECA's programmes of activities in the areas of gender, poverty, informatics, and the role of civil society in the management of population dynamics.

In similar fashion, ECA expects to continue working with FAO to build a regional framework, including the promotion of intra-African and world trade to ensure food security and nutritional sufficiency in line with the Rome Declaration adopted in October 1996. Toward this end, ECA and FAO are now planning a follow-up meeting in Africa to implement the goals of the World Food Summit, which include addressing issues that affect food security such as agriculture and rural development policies and priorities, food reserves, political stability and governance, and stabilization of populations. In addition, ECA and FAO will collaborate to develop a consolidated database on African agriculture and natural resources that will be made available to support those entities working on regional food security.

With UNEP, ECA will collaborate on integrating environmental concerns into development policies, providing a forum for discussing transboundary issues related to sustainable development such as pollution and environmental degradation, and keeping the critical concerns of the Rio Conference and Agenda 21 in the forefront of development planning. Specific activities will include joint studies, organization of policy seminars and workshops, and advocacy of environmentally sound development.

UNICEF, ILO, WHO, and UNESCO. With UNICEF, the Commission plans to collaborate in the collection and analyses of social and economic data as a tool for monitoring poverty, particularly as it pertains to the socio-economic situation of African children. In addition, ECA will continue to promote the Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys initiative and assist with publishing the Annual Report on the State of Africa's Children.

The Commission and ILO, who share responsibilities as lead UN agencies in poverty reduction for the UN Special System-wide Initiative on Africa, will collaborate to promote informal sector and employment-generating strategies.

ECA and WHO will work together by putting forward fiscal policies that benefit health sector development in Africa. They will also strengthen past collaboration in raising awareness about the socio-economic impacts of HIV/AIDS.

The Commission and UNESCO will cooperate by utilizing information technology for development, promoting basic education, building the capacities of civil society to ensure good governance, and promoting science and technology exchanges, including South-South cooperation.

UNCTAD and UNIDO. In the post-Uruguay Round of trade liberalization and the integration of factor and product markets, Africa faces the challenge of becoming an integral part of the world economy through trade, investment, industrial development, and a balanced relationship with transnational corporations. ECA will collaborate closely with UNCTAD and WTO to assist African countries in developing and adopting policies to increase regional and external trade, with emphasis on viable strategies for diversifying export products and markets.

The Commission's work with UNIDO will centre on private-sector and industrial development, as well as devising programmes at the regional level to strengthen the capacities of Member States for trade negotiation and development.

World Bank and IMF. In recent years, there has been considerable convergence in ECA and World Bank perspectives on the reform agenda that African countries should implement in order to stimulate growth and reduce poverty. The groundwork has been laid for collaboration and the two organizations are committed to working together closely in a variety of areas where ECA can provide value-added services, particularly in poverty monitoring, assessment, and analyses; these services would then be followed up by policy advocacy, a special comparative advantage for the Commission, which is well placed to promote African 'ownership' of economic and social reforms. To enable ECA's work, the Bank will collaborate on research issues of population, food security, environment, and infrastructure development, as well as share its comprehensive African household survey database.

In addition, ECA and the Bank's Economic Development Institute are forging a strong relationship for collaborating on training and capacity-building through seminars and workshops on poverty analysis, gender advocacy, and knowledge management. The International Monetary Fund has indicated interest in helping ECA strengthen its capacities in policy analysis, research and data processing, and the collection of fiscal, monetary, and balance-of-payment statistics. These efforts would be facilitated through training at the IMF Institute and through visitor programmes at the IMF for ECA staff.

Special Regional Partner Institutions

ECA is fortunate that its Member States match those of its political counterpart, the Organization of African Unity and its development funding counterpart, the African Development Bank. The combined mandates of these three institutions make for a powerful and critical partnership for Africa. The comparative advantages of each institution will make it possible to identify and execute comprehensive strategies for Africa.

A recent and very significant example of cooperation among OAU, ADB, and ECA was the adoption in 1995 by the OAU Council of Ministers in Cairo of the resolution, 'Re-launching Africa's Economic and Social Development: The Cairo Agenda for Action'.

The Cairo Agenda was subsequently adopted at the 1995 summit meeting of African heads of states. Supporting growth and economic recovery, it reaffirms that African governments and African people have primary responsibility for their own development.

Summarizing the New Approach

ECA will concentrate its resources on critical issues and cut back on the number of projects it undertakes. To draw on intellectual strengths throughout the continent, the Commission will also establish new operational practices. Although providing advisory services to Member States is one of the primary functions of ECA, it is unlikely that ECA will ever have sufficient resources to cover all issues of concern to Africa's nations. Tapping expertise outside the Commission is a more effective way to amass talent on behalf of the region, and is also the most cost-effective way to make relevant and timely advice available to Member States.

This new concentration of effort is reflected in an ECA organization chart with fewer boxes and a deliberately flatter structure that promotes exchange among all levels, fosters interdisciplinary work, and ensures more efficient management. Further measures call for enhancing the ECA management team, reforming virtually every aspect of its modalities to improve capacity, undertaking efficiency measures, and vigorously upgrading staff capabilities.

To leverage its development impact and those of its UN sister agencies and regional partner institutions, the Commission will take every opportunity for collaboration. The more considered planning and the efficiencies thus gained will further the quality and pace of African development.

Thus, the stage is set for the Commission to become a networker of development expertise in Africa, a clearing-house for best practices, a policy integrator that respects and draws together analyses from a number of fields, and a catalyst for ideas.

Management Changes to Enable ECA's New Work

ECA is undertaking significant reforms to carry out its renewal. It is establishing new systems, a new management team, numerous efficiency measures, improved human resource capabilities, and new modalities for delivering programmes. Some of the important results will be

• Fewer and improved reports.
• Fewer and more productive meetings.
• Enhanced networking with key actors in Africa's development.
• Increased interaction with Member States, including more technical support.
• Strategic partnerships.

The Executive Secretary has created a Change Management Team, drawn from ECA staff, to support internal changes in four areas: administration programme management, human resources management, and information management. Senior-level UN Headquarters officials have encouraged ECA's in-house changes, calling the advances 'pacesetting'.

Administration

A critical element in the overhaul of ECA's management has been the recruitment of a highly qualified, new senior management team (annex B). These chiefs of division for the six programme and three administrative areas are being selected for their intellectual, technical, and managerial excellence. They will provide the leadership necessary for focusing on ECA's work programmes, creating a team environment, and motivating staff to reach their highest potential. All will have responsibilities for managing programmes, strengthening staff through recruitment and training, forming highly effective networking teams, and in addition, bridging technical and political issues and effectively translating recommendations into actions. In sum, the new chiefs will be the policy and institutional change agents who will move the Commission to operate effectively in a dynamic international setting.

Several ECA divisions have been consolidated to cut down on bureaucracy and speed work. This simplified structure will promote greater interdisciplinary activity and a better concentration of talent around specific problems. A major reassignment of professional staff is already taking place, the result of an in-depth assessment of personnel skills not only by human resource specialists, but also by the individual staff members themselves. As a result, ECA will be able to muster the capabilities of its staff in ways not achieved before.

Two administrative divisions are now in place: one to handle human resources and the other to manage physical systems and property, including the recently opened UN Conference Centre in Addis Ababa. (The former, single administrative division had employed 40 percent of the staff and created an organizational imbalance.) Restructuring into two administrative sections permits a sharper focus and more direct reporting on administrative issues to the Executive Secretary.

Meanwhile, twenty-five projects to increase efficiencies are underway in the budget and finance areas alone. For example, reporting on extra-budgetary projects will be improved; better reporting on salary payments has been instituted; projects are underway to clear a backlog of unanalysed accounts; and time- and cost-recording management systems are being instituted.

To further save valuable time and resources, meetings will be fewer in number and more tightly run (i.e., results-oriented). An informal council of advisors has already provided ECA with excellent guidance on parliamentary processes that make better use of ministers' time and efforts at annual meetings.

Programme Management

The first administrative change instituted in the renewed ECA was the creation of a consolidated office to manage programme, budget, finance, monitoring, and evaluation. Two major efficiencies are expected:

• In the past, programme managers had to obtain approvals from two offices for expenditures, one related to line-item budget management and one related to programme authorization. Now managers will have broader authority and need only to seek approval for managing within a defined programme (i.e., they will have flexibility to manage resources within budgets, negotiating approvals only with the new programme office).

• At the same time, the programme office will have wider authority to define and oversee the Commission's systems for programme accountability. Heightened attention will be paid to monitoring and evaluation for programme impact. Past monitoring and evaluation tended to focus on accomplishment of outputs, a poor measure of whether socio-economic change is occurring. This one office will now handle planning, programming, finance, and evaluation, making it easier to assure that substance is at the heart of all ECA activities.

Meanwhile as the management of programmes is being decentralized, improved programme and financial reporting systems will facilitate management overviews of the work, increase flexibility in managing resources, and enhance timeliness so that resource reallocations can be accomplished in an orderly way.

Raising extra-budgetary resources will now be a line, not a staff, function so that line experts can meet with ECA partners and not have their proposals interpreted by staff less familiar with technical details.

The entire procurement system is also being improved. In the future, managers who require particular products and services will be held accountable for them. In addition, there will be fewer steps in the procurement process. To hasten the procurement process even more, UN Headquarters has raised the threshold for procurement expenditures that ECA can make without Headquarters approval.

Advised by a mission from the World Bank, ECA is designing and implementing a more accurate time-recording system. Since most overhead costs involve staffing and consultants, a record of the hours spent at each task will help determine the activities that are cost-effective and those that are not.

In the past, ECA staff evaluated their work products within their own divisions without the rigorous involvement of other specialists inside or outside ECA. In the future, written work will be more closely edited than before for content and presentation, and periodic surveys will be conducted to measure client satisfaction.

Building-management improvements call for reconfiguring offices to utilize space more efficiently and arranging for more on-site storage space. The business plan for 1997 includes promotional campaigns for commercializing ECA buildings, including renting out the new UN Conference Centre when not used by UN agencies. Security systems will be restructured, and security personnel will be better trained and equipped.

Human Resources Management

For all substantive work and efficiencies to come together, ECA needs the right people. ECA is, therefore, working to transform an ineffective personnel system into one that is open, equitable, and effective. It will also become an organization where managers manage rather than administer, employees are treated fairly, and resources from the diverse and growing pool of talent in Africa are increasingly utilized.

Among the first steps in the renewal of ECA, therefore, is rationalizing the staff in light of ECA's new work programme. Here the need is to eliminate redundancy and redeploy staff to high-priority areas.

To make the best use of its human resource potential, ECA will then undertake a major training programme to upgrade staff skills. As part of a UN-wide reform, the Commission is also instituting a performance-based management system that includes annual appraisals of all staff. This new staff-evaluation tool will help ECA focus on results, identify and recognize better performance, and provide a way to separate out non-performing staff.

An overall goal will be to reduce 'permanent' staff costs to allow more flexibility in the use of resources. Retirements, attritions, and phase-outs will contribute to many vacancies. Rather than filling every available position with a permanent hire, ECA will translate the resulting savings in staff costs into greater productivity and return on resources. Moving rapidly to achieve cost-effectiveness, ECA, for example, will be hiring short-term expertise in critical areas, purchasing much-needed modern equipment, and offering more training opportunities. The result will be a leaner and more productive staff, equipped with good tools and supplemented by temporary assistance when needed. Staff capabilities will also be expanded through staff exchanges, new hires, fellowships and internships to attract specialists,* and guest speakers covering new developments in key fields.

The ECA Staff Council has been consulted regularly and is highly supportive of the Commission's steps to utilize staff skills better and create more effective, transparent, and professional management of staff. Overall employee signals have been positive, helping to create a culture of renewal.

Initial training will emphasize how to function in the new ECA work environment, work in teams, and learn from substantive seminars. Topics will cover the state of the art in development fields, analytical tools, and information technology (the latter especially for use in research, writing, and presentations). Innovative, experimental teaching techniques will include use of the Internet and video-based curricula. Administrative and support-staff skills will also be upgraded to work with modern technology.

When feasible, training will cross divisional lines and will concentrate on methodologies and substantive developments in specific fields. Combined with an intensive follow-up period and wider access to global information systems, this training should sharply reduce a sense of staff intellectual isolation. Emphasis on professional training will also attract higher quality employees to ECA. Previously, staff training had benefited only a lucky few.

As ECA implements this kind of training, it will evolve into a learning organization. This means that staff will learn from what they do and be able to share their knowledge with colleagues, partners, and clients.

Also being initiated are career counselling; a more user-friendly, less bureaucratic employee benefits package; and an in-house service to resolve staff grievances and appeals.

Information Management

ECA's communication equipment harks from an earlier era. A World Bank team recently completed its review of these systems and made recommendations for modernization. Plans are already being implemented to replace rotary phones with a digital system and establish an ECA World Wide Web site. Staff computer skills will be upgraded, and new hardware and software will accelerate technical analysis and work production. The local area network (LAN) system will be extended throughout the Commission.

The extensive contents of ECA's library will be integrated into ECA's computerized network. Internet and prototype World Wide Web sites have already been set up. Information will be placed on CD-ROMs for easier dissemination. Videoconferencing with translation capacity is envisioned.

Assisted by the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London) and a leading South African development journalist, as well as other experts, ECA will upgrade its entire publications operation to reach larger audiences more efficiently. ECA will soon be turning out fewer but more useful publications, frequently issuing them in such series as briefing papers, policy position papers, research findings, and a newsletter describing ECA's projects. Publications will be compiled by qualified experts, subject to peer review, and edited by professionals. They will be disseminated more widely than previously and will be available on the Internet and CD-ROMs. Cost savings will come from greater reliance on in-house services for editing, translation, and document production.

PART II

Proposals for Partnership

Overview of Proposals

Part I of this prospectus described how the Economic Commission for Africa is preparing itself for new partnerships through extensive organizational renewal. This renewal process involves establishing a new organizational structure, new programming systems, and a new management team, and instituting numerous reforms to make ECA more efficient and effective.

These actions are the result of a series of studies conducted for the Commission and intensive consultations held with a wide range of African leaders, ECA's official bodies, and development partners during 1995-96. The consensus: The Commission should seek collaboration wherever possible and share resources, with each party concentrating on what it does best.

Part II contains the seventeen proposals for collaboration that grew directly out of the intensive consultations, particularly the Partners Meeting in April 1996. (See page 7 for participants.) This consultative meeting, convened in Addis Ababa, brought together twenty-nine partners countries--and organizations--to share information and perspectives with key ECA staff on planning for the renewal of the ECA. At the end of three days of intensive and productive exchange, the partners affirmed their institutional support of, and confidence in, ECA, citing the important role a renewed Commission could play in the development of Africa. Confirming the findings from earlier consultations, the partners examined ECA's comparative advantages and urged the Commission to focus on the critical areas where it could provide value added services:

• Establishing a clearing-house of African development information, collecting and disseminating relevant data to Member States, development organizations, academic institutions, research, and the public through worldwide electronic connectivity.

• Offering a programme of advisory services to members, sharing the benefits of best practices and lessons learned from African models and other parts of the developing world.
• Serving as a catalyst for African development activities by assisting the many organizations on the continent who share common goals to coalesce and coordinate efforts.
• Serving as a policy advocate on critical development issues to encourage the policy initiatives and reforms necessary for economic and social advancement.
• Building capacity in Member States through training, seminars, and workshops targeted to developing critical skills in support of ECA programme objectives.
• Facilitating research-within the Commission, in Member States, and among development organizations-that fosters, synthesizes, and enables the studies needed for considered decision-making.

A major outcome of the meeting was identification by ECA and its partners of specific areas and modalities for collaboration. Stressing the importance of each partner contributing in areas of comparative advantage to achieve optimal output,

they suggested sharing of data, joint studies and sponsorships of seminars, combined missions to Member States, staff exchanges, and networking on issues of mutual concern.

Table 3 summarizes the seventeen proposals in the context of the major work that the Commission looks forward to sharing with partners from 1997-2001. Following the table are brief descriptions of each proposal containing the objectives, background, components, time-table, expected results, and some of the suggested roles for partners. As partners indicate areas of collaboration, ECA will finalize detailed plans for implementation and types of support.

Although ECA is inviting a new focus and scale to its partnerships, it also seeks to build on the partnerships it has enjoyed in the past. For example, for many years the Commission has received support for its women's programs from the UNDP and bi-laterals such as Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, UNFPA, and UNIFEM-all of whom have helped to build the organizations and networks that have brought African women's issues to the fore.

Many collaborators, including IDRC, ADB, UNDP, the Netherlands, South Korea, the Carnegie Foundation, and USAID have contributed to information technology developments such as the Africa Information Society Initiative. In addition, the area of science and technology has been consistently fostered by the Carnegie Foundation. In the area of trade and investment promotion, the Government of Japan has been a consistent supporter. The Government of South Korea has recently funded activities in support of small-scale industry. Generous support over time from the Government of Germany has funded projects on civil society, leadership, and governance, as well as on development of the informal sector. Furthermore, many donors such as France, UNFPA, and UNEP have funded research activities that have aided in the areas of food security, population, and the environment.

During the review of partner relations, it became clear to the Commission that there was room for improvement in the way ECA collaborated with partners. In the past, projects were single, relatively short-term, often isolated efforts that were not part of a larger plan. Projects were undertaken in a piecemeal fashion without benefit of an overall framework. Although each programme may have been valid and useful, there may not have been sufficient consideration of the interrelationships with ECA's own and other African development programmes.

At this point, ECA is offering a new approach to collaborative programming-one that is coherent and within a clear framework. ECA understands that other organizations working in African development may take the lead in certain areas because of their competitive advantages or greater resources. In such instances, ECA's role will be to assist by using the Commission's unique position within the United Nations to facilitate and advocate in support of partner efforts.

Partners are invited to identify parts of the proposals that fit their development agendas and determine where collaboration with ECA will maximize return on resources. Most of the proposals are in direct support of Member States, but four proposals (14 to 17) are aimed at increasing the institutional strength of the Commission itself: Upgrading ECA Capacity in Information and Communications Technology, Increasing ECA Capacity Through Staff Training, Communicating Information About African Development, and Engaging the Public Through the Mass Media. Although each of the proposals is important to ECA's future, these four proposals require special attention because they are critical to providing the internal capacity that will enable all the programmes of the Commission.

Because of the scope of the proposals, ECA is inviting participation from several partners on each proposal effort. This invitation is not only consistent with the idea of creating synergies by capitalizing on the strengths of the various players in African development, but also follows from recommendations at the Partners Meeting that ECA be a catalyst for African development. This multi-collaborator approach will also enhance efficiency by ensuring an integrated effort, thereby minimizing redundancy and the fragmented efforts of the past.

Table 3.

ECA's Major Work, 1997-2001

CORE PROGRAMME SUPPORT

Facilitating Economic and Social Policy Analysis

To provide timely and influential information and analyses of issues relevant to several countries or to issues that have regional dimensions. The emphasis will be on macro-policy issues-including Africa's trade, aid, and monetary options-that could further Africa's stake in the global economy. Additional emphasis will go to social development issues, particularly the strategies and reforms needed to alleviate poverty.

Accelerating Africa's Fight Against Poverty (PROPOSAL 1) signals a major commitment to report, advise, and stimulate work on poverty issues in Africa.

Expanding African Trade and Promoting International Competitiveness (PROPOSAL 2) seeks to assist African countries to lay the base for the institutional and human resource capacities needed to accelerate growth in international and subregional trade, and also strengthen ECA's capacity to assist African countries.

Ensuring Food Security and Sustainable Development

To raise awareness among African policy-makers of the urgent need to integrate food, population, and environment concerns in development planning. The emphasis will be on building national capacity to undertake integrated analyses on issues of food security, population dynamics, and environmental stability.

Addressing Africa's Urgent Nexus: Food, Population, Environment (PROPOSAL 3) would analyse the interplay of population dynamics, food security, and the environment while creating better political understanding of these issues and advocating policies for addressing these problems at senior levels of government.

Building Africa's Capacity for Science and Technology (PROPOSAL 4) would expand national discussions and capabilities on appropriate science and technology policies-especially those related to the 'nexus' issues.

Strengthening Development Management

To promote efficiency and competency in the public sector, public policies that are friendly to the private sector, and a robust civil society involved in development concerns. To these ends, ECA will help governments, associations, private-sector organizations, and civil society strengthen their operations and policies.

Strengthening African Civil Society for Development and Peace (PROPOSAL 5) would build on ECA's well-received work in this area, permitting ECA to establish a centre to strengthen the capabilities of non-governmental organizations; work with national governments to create an enabling society for civil society; and strengthen selected NGOs active in peace-building, conflict prevention, and reconciliation of peoples in Africa. A significant impact of these efforts should be more pluralistic approaches to development problems.

Reviving Private Investment in Africa (PROPOSAL 6)aims to provide assistance to African countries in promoting foreign and domestic private investment, support the implementation of market- and investor-friendly policies and regulations, and disseminate information on best practices for attracting investments, including privatization.

Mobilizing Africa's Capital Markets (PROPOSAL 7)would launch an African Capital Markets Forum to foster capital markets throughout the continent with the cooperation of the public and private sectors.

Harnessing Information for Development

To promote policies that expedite the use of information technology and systems in Africa's development. In the process, a clearing-house of development information will be created to service Africa and the global development community.

The goal of Building the African Information Society (PROPOSAL 8) is no less than to help Africa enter the Information Age. ECA would emphasize the importance of national information planning and information services on Africa's development, make information about Africa's development more available within Africa and elsewhere, and help African states prepare policies to support the spread of information services, including connections with the Internet.

A related issue, Promoting Statistics Development in Africa (PROPOSAL 9), would increase services to national governments organizing their own data systems and increase the analysis side of ECA's work in statistics. The proposal is of particular urgency in view of Africa's need to prepare better for Year 2000 census responsibilities.

Promoting Regional Cooperation and Integration

To help African nations combine their strengths, particularly through integrated trade and monetary systems. A special emphasis will be on supporting subregional organizations, the building blocks of original integration. Transportation is also a sine qua non for regional trade and integration.

Linking African States Through Efficient, Reliable Transportation Systems (PROPOSAL 10)would foster implementation of policies and programs that improve the efficiency, quality, and coverage of transport services in Member States and enhance regional transport linkages.

CROSS-CUTTING THEME

Fostering Leadership and Empowerment for Women in Africa (PROPOSAL 11) would set up a Leadership Fund for African Women to promote the participation, empowerment, and leadership of women in the economy and in politics throughout Africa. Through the fund, ECA would also help Member States follow-up on the Platform of Action agreed on at the Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing.

ADDITION OF SPECIAL DIMENSIONS

Networking to Provide Economic and Social Policy Advice in Africa (PROPOSAL 12) invites collaboration in establishing networks of policy analysts who can help ECA provide more up-to-date, pragmatic, and influential advice to Member States on policy matters ranging from the design of strategies to the design of international negotiating positions.

Advancing South-South Cooperation (PROPOSAL 13)would help Africa learn and benefit from the lessons of other areas of the world, particularly in the areas of trade, investment, and development information. At the same time this cooperation will lay the groundwork for sustainable networks of mutual interest.

ENHANCEMENT OF ECA CAPACITIES

Upgrading ECA Capacity in Information and Communications Technology (PROPOSAL 14)would enable far higher productivity, more sophisticated analysis, and closer communications with Member States, ECA's Subregional Development Centres, and partners.

Increasing ECA Capacity Through Staff Training (PROPOSAL 15) would strengthen staff capabilities by providing formal training, establishing fellowships and internships, and reducing the intellectual isolation of staff.

Communicating Information About African Development (PROPOSAL 16) relates to greatly enhancing ECA's outreach activities by revising every single step of the publications process, from concept to dissemination, to make materials more understandable and useful.

Engaging the Public Through the Mass Media (PROPOSAL 17) would modernize ECA's public communications technology systems, bringing about far higher productivity, more sophisticated analysis, and more exciting publications.

CORE PROGRAMME SUPPORT

• Facilitating Economic and Social Policy Analysis

• Ensuring Food Security and Sustainable Development

• Strengthening Development Management

• Harnessing Information for Development

• Promoting Regional Cooperation and Integration
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Facilitating Economic and Social Policy Analysis
Accelerating Africa's Fight Against Poverty

The measure of a nation's living standards stems from data on per capita income and consumption, infant mortality and life expectancy, and education and literacy. Some of this information comes from household data collection, a research methodology that is still new in a

number of African countries. In addition, better regional and national data are needed to fill out the true extent of the poverty picture in Africa.

Experiences in other regions of the world demonstrate that operationalizing a commitment to poverty reduction depends heavily on a strong national capacity to monitor poverty and assess the impact of public policies on the welfare of households. Indonesia and India are two excellent examples. ECA is well placed to act with its Member States in this regard, in part because it has been asked to join the World Bank-led Special Programme of Action Sub-group on Poverty.

Proposal Components

ECA plans to help nations monitor trends in living standards, identify where living standards are being improved, and, when necessary, promote poverty-reduction interventions. Work will first take place with selected countries already committed to establishing policy-relevant data systems.

The Commission will also encourage governments to adopt a poverty-reduction approach consisting of three elements:

• Pursuing broad-based growth strategies that utilize labour.
• Developing the human capital of the poor, primarily through investments in education and health.
• Designing and delivering targeted safety net programmes to vulnerable groups.

Data Collection

To date, the World Bank has collected about thirty comprehensive data sets on household well-being in Africa, which it proposes to transfer to ECA for housing and more comprehensive analysis. This regional database will supply much-needed comparable data support for planners, policy analysts, and researchers on poverty issues throughout the continent.

Recognizing the need for more and higher quality data collection throughout the continent, ECA also plans to work with Member States to develop and field-test new survey instruments. These instruments must be less cumbersome and more cost-effective than in the past, yet still produce high-quality results. In this connection, ECA will participate in the new UN Interagency Work Programme on Poverty Monitoring with UNDP, UNICEF, and the World Bank. Research and pilot-testing of the survey instruments to confirm findings will be repeated a year later.

Information Dissemination

It is proposed that facilitating poverty-policy exchanges among African policy-makers be accomplished through seminars and poverty conferences in African capitals. Participants will also include local researchers, development practitioners, and representatives of development agencies and non-governmental organizations.

The major product on poverty will be a new, collaborative effort led by ECA: The Annual Report on the State of Africa's People. It will feature statistical series, reports on new poverty strategies, detailed descriptions of best cases for remedying poverty, and commissioned articles on the ways in which governments and civil society can best reduce poverty.

ECA hopes to foster dialogue between users and producers of poverty data and expand dissemination of its poverty-related work through its electronic data network, the Pan-African Development Information Service (PADIS), and by issuing periodic newsletters on poverty monitoring.

Technical Support

In-country workshops are proposed to give participants the analytical and conceptual tools for measuring poverty and applying their findings to policy-making, many based on examples of best practices. Where feasible, ECA will co-sponsor these workshops with local universities and think-tanks, and also explore joint sponsorship with the World Bank's Economic Development Institute and other partners.

As poverty-monitoring efforts start to pick up pace, work at the Commission itself will become attractive to specialists in poverty reduction. Senior fellows will conduct research, guide other scholars pursuing similar poverty studies, and contribute papers on poverty in Africa to top African publications. Junior fellowships will go to students doing dissertation research; internships will backstop ECA's work on poverty.

Specialized training will also qualify more personnel to lead seminars within ECA and for the wider policy community.

Influence on Policy

At meetings of its own Conference of Ministers, ECA will highlight the results of poverty research and set the stage for strong national efforts to attack poverty. Where appropriate, ECA will recommend courses of action to other policy-makers, working closely with the UNDP, ADB, World Bank, and other organizations with substantial poverty-related programmes in Africa.

Expected Results

Expanded, timely poverty-monitoring data will encourage well-informed dialogue among local policy-makers and other stakeholders on new ways to reduce poverty.

Member States will be in a better position to collect, analyse, and make full use of poverty data.

A cadre of local professionals will be available to undertake poverty-related work and stimulate top-level discussions on poverty-reduction strategies.

Partners' Contribution

Partners are specifically invited to work with ECA to review details of the proposed poverty-monitoring approach, suggest improvements in strategy, augment skills for poverty monitoring, and devise the best ways to strengthen capacities for these tasks. Joint sponsorship of national and regional seminars and workshops would add strength to the initiative. Partners are also invited to plan how poverty assessments and anti-poverty policies can be made a priority by African states and their supporters.

Facilitating Economic and Social Policy Analysis

Expanding African Trade and Promoting International Competitiveness

The worldwide liberalization of trade and finance, and its impetus to the globalization of production and markets, are opening up opportunities for African countries to expand trade outside the continent. Global trade should be greatly improved, for example, now that the Uruguay Round has been completed.

The resulting reduction of tariffs and other commercial-policy barriers to trade will make for a more transparent and stronger rule-based multilateral trading system that will enhance trade prospects. Among the many benefits will be additional stimuli to the growing flow of foreign direct investment that, in turn, will widen the likelihood of securing non-debt-creating investment finance from abroad and open up Africa's access to the technology, management skills, and entrepreneurial know-how essential to development.

However, their structurally weak economic situation and the scarcity of applicable institutional and human resource capacities keep many African countries from taking advantage of these new trade opportunities, and they risk being marginalized. Among the constraints are supply-side impediments to expanding traditional primary products and non-traditional products (including efficient import substitute production), commodity dependence, and external debt. The constraints also include weak technological capacity; lack of entrepreneurial, marketing, and technical skills; paucity of long-term finance; expensive trade credit and pre-shipment finance; deficiencies in the physical infrastructure; inadequate legal and regulatory frameworks; and absence of a coherent strategy for export development.

The prospects for growth of trade in Africa will, therefore, depend to a large extent on national and international efforts supporting the expansion and diversification of both African products and markets. Trade growth, in general, can be promoted through policies and actions designed to strengthen supply capabilities, enhance the ability to take full advantage of trading opportunities, and improve market access. Weaker countries also need assistance in overcoming transitional difficulties and constraints, including those arising from commodity dependence. Subregional and regional integration arrangements that create larger 'local' markets and economic spaces for smaller African countries would also help.

Proposal Components

In collaboration with partner organizations, ECA will assist African countries to develop and use their institutional and human-resource capacities in the service of expanding exports and diversifying export products and services. The Commission will also provide support for establishing the policies and mechanisms that facilitate enterprise development, including removal of regulatory and fiscal biases against domestic entrepreneurial activity, better access to credit and appropriate technology (process and product design), and technical and managerial training.

Best Practices

Enhancing the supply capabilities of African countries calls, in part, for building on developing country experiences (especially in East Asia and Latin America) that have brought about a more vibrant, dynamic, and competitive private sector; and expanding and diversifying exports through enterprise development, particularly in new industries. The history of these successes will enable policy-makers and relevant parties in individual African countries to appreciate the array of effective policy options, incentive systems, and institutional arrangements that can heighten the effectiveness of trade strategies.

ECA will, therefore, help identify and disseminate information on best practices regarding policies and institutions for promoting development of entrepreneurship and internationally competitive enterprises.

Trade Information

ECA will support better use and enhancement of institutions and mechanisms (public, private, or mixed) for helping export producers stay abreast of trading opportunities and the means to take advantage of them. In this way, the producers will be better equipped to work with traditional and non-traditional markets under general and preferential trade access through such arrangements as the Generalized System of Trade Preferences, the LomÇ Convention, and the Global System of Trade Preferences.

Exporters will also receive assistance with identifying trading opportunities in both global and regional trade; establishing and using national and subregional institutions; compiling information on markets and quality control and other standards; securing export financing and trade promotion; and training public- and private-sector trade operators on procedures and techniques in global, regional, and subregional trade. Trainees would include officials from ministries of commerce, export promotion agents, national customs services, and members of export associations.

Multilateral Trading

Africa needs a better capacity to defend national trade and economic interests, frame multilateral trade agreements within the World Trade Organization, discharge multilateral obligations, and make effective use of trading rights under multilateral rules. An immediate concern is to ensure that African states are aware of their rights under the Uruguay Round Agreement and can defend their interests in follow-up negotiations on the interpretation and implementation of those commitments.

Working closely with the WTO and other relevant international organizations, ECA will help African countries enhance their human-resource and administrative infrastructure, meet their obligations, and take advantage of their rights under the multilateral trading system. Countries will also be helped to identify opportunities arising from the Uruguay Round Agreement and take maximum advantage of the special and differential measures relevant to them as provided for in the Uruguay Round and Marrakesh Decision on Least Developed Countries. To facilitate understanding of the multilateral trading system, ECA will also analyse new and emerging issues on the international trade agenda from a development perspective. African countries in the process of gaining membership in the WTO will learn about WTO rights and obligations and the need to improve the transparency of their regimes.

Regional Trade and Payment

Subregional trading and payment arrangements, essential to the growth of larger markets and economic spaces in the region, must be set up to the mutual advantage of all participating African countries. Strengthening subregional economic organizations, including the cross-border initiative in trade and investment in eastern and southern Africa, will enable Member States to achieve their full economic potential.

Expected Results

A large number of African countries will get the advice, analyses, and tools they need (including databases, information systems, and training programmes) to enlarge the institutional and human-resource capacities of both the public and private sectors to engage in trade development and investment expansion.

African governments and traders will be more knowledgeable about global and regional trading opportunities, international trading rules and procedures, requirements for trade success in both global and regional markets, and ways to tackle the constraints on trading opportunities and thereby attract direct foreign investment.

ECA will be in a better position to help more African countries boost trade and investment.

Partners' Contribution

ECA will seek partnerships in this programme area to bolster the human and institutional capacities of African countries to expand their trade through export diversification, improved access to information on trading opportunities, and strengthened regional tracking and payment arrangements. These tasks will be accomplished by building the technical capacity for the electronic flow of timely information on trade, dissemination of best practices, the provision of advisory missions to relevant institutions, and the organization of training workshops.

Specifically, partners will be asked to assist in (1) conducting country-specific consultative studies to determine feasible and coherent national strategies for achieving accelerated growth in trade and investment, particularly sustained and diversified growth of exports; (2) conducting studies to identify best practices to promote enterprise development in the export sector; (3) setting up and strengthening existing trade information systems; (4) providing training on international trading rules and procedures in both the global and subregional contexts; (5) assisting African countries at the national, subregional, regional, and international levels to participate effectively in the multilateral trading system and to derive maximum benefits from the Uruguay Round Agreement; and (6) strengthening the capacity of the subregional trade and investment organizations.

Ensuring Food Security and Sustainable Development

Addressing Africa's Urgent Nexus: Food, Population, Environment

Despite repeated pledges by African leaders to address the continent's rising food needs, its increasing population density, and the continued stripping of its natural resource patrimony, the rhetoric has frequently outrun performance.

Many African countries still face growing environmental problems caused by depletion of forests, fuel supplies, and soil quality. Ten nations are already suffering critical water shortages, with an equal number on the brink of shortage. As countries become more and more urbanized, they find it increasingly difficult to maintain water and air quality and handle the sanitary disposal of waste.

Africa's population is increasing rapidly, but experts have identified a number of effective interventions for minimizing population growth. They include universal education, an increase in age at the time of marriage, improved maternal and child health care, an adequate rate of employment, and a social security safety net to assist the poor.

ECA's activities that bear on these issues require recasting. Currently, ECA has a staff on agriculture (formerly a joint operation with the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization), which has concentrated on production; a staff on population, which has concentrated on demographics; and a staff on natural resources. These staffs will now be merged to work on the nexus of issues that emphasize food security, creation and implementation of a range of population-planning policies that take into account the determinants of population size, and environment sustainability.

Proposal Components

The nexus area presents a number of considerable challenges as it attempts to weave together three substantive issues while creating better understanding between the technical and political levels of national decision-making. Although there was general agreement at the April 1996 consultation on ECA's renewal that nexus issues demand urgent attention, the development partners cautioned ECA to focus its energies on information collection and dissemination and, most particularly, on advocacy of sound policies with the Member States. Because of the complexities involved, ECA has decided that, over the next eighteen to twenty-four months, it should concentrate on nexus planning and internal capacity-building.

Planning

Perhaps a third of Africa's countries have national population plans. An equal number have environmental plans. Food self-sufficiency is a goal at the political level, with leadership commitments to invest 20 percent of governmental budgets in food production. A different story emerges when one sees that the relatively few definitive accomplishments that occurred did so when the nexus issues were brought together in convincing ways at the political level. The key questions now are

• How can policy-makers be persuasively reached on the nexus issues?
• How can public administrators best manage the nexus issues?

It is proposed that ECA and its partners use two approaches for planning work in the nexus areas, as follows:

• Form an advisory group comprising leaders from the three nexus areas. The group would be made up of senior policy-makers and experts who understand how decision-making is influenced. The advisory group would be available collectively to discuss broad strategy approaches and individually to help plan specific tasks. Initial soundings with senior economists and scientists indicate support for this idea.

• Convene at least one senior-level meeting, perhaps at the cabinet level, to discuss how the nexus issues can be made politically attractive and how ECA and its partners can be more helpful in government work on these issues. The one or more meetings will include discussion of how to raise issues at the political level, integrate issues at the policy level, and manage the issues at the ministerial-sectoral level. These discussions should yield practical advice on what nexus work can have a positive effect on decision-making.
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ECA Capacity-Building

During this planning period, appropriate capacities must be established within ECA so that service to Africa (especially on the nexus issues) and highly productive future partnerships can be well managed. It would involve establishing new sets of relationships in-house and externally and re-engineering ECA staff capabilities.

The first priority is to upgrade staff skills. In addition to restructuring itself and bringing in new leadership, ECA will augment its expertise by bringing in new hires and senior fellows, new training procedures, and sound management procedures that gracefully end a number of activities while setting the framework for new endeavours. As suggested above, expertise in food security will be needed more than in production; expertise in sustainable environmental actions will be needed more than in natural resource development; and expertise in directly and indirectly applying policies affecting population size will be needed more than demographic expertise.

The other priority in capacity-building is to establish viable working relationships with appropriate networks, policy centres, and other sources of expertise to foster action on the nexus issues. To the greatest extent possible, prospective partners should be engaged early so they can be involved in planning programmes.

Expected Results

ECA and its partners will establish a clear and intellectually cogent approach to addressing Africa's most urgent issues in its 1998-2001 Medium-Term Plan, if not beyond.

ECA staff will be better prepared to carry out an agenda for dealing with Africa's food, population, and environment concerns.

An established network of experts, including distinguished fellows who have worked at ECA, will be ready to support partnership work on nexus issues.

Linkages forged between ECA and its partners with senior planners and policy-makers in a number of Member States will subsequently help implement programmes that cope with nexus issues.

Solutions to food security, rapid population increase, and a deteriorating environment will become part of an increasing number of national and major regional development activities.

A continuing dialogue on best practices will be established for making nexus issues a priority concern at the political and financial levels of planning.

Partners' Contribution

The partnerships sought in this proposal are qualitatively different from the other proposals. The approaches require new ways of strategic thinking, retooling, and relationship-building. Partners are asked to be fully involved in the strategic planning. It would be desirable if partners could lend high-level people to work side by side with ECA during all or part of the planning period. A consortium of partners would also attract interest and make meetings at the cabinet level more feasible.

Partners are also invited to consider ways of intensively working together to help build staff, possibly through a thoughtful combination of academics and policy experts. It is possible that the shared experiences will lead to the partners working together on capacity-building tasks in future years.


Ensuring Food Security and Sustainable Development

Building Africa's Capacity for Science and Technology

ECA has long recognized that Africa cannot share in the fruits of modernity and grow economically unless it develops and takes full advantage of its abilities to foster and utilize science and technology. However, inappropriate policies and strategies at national levels have tended to isolate science- and technology-led development in Africa from the mainstream of national economic activity.

One reason is that much attention has been given to organizing and funding government-led research. Largely lost in the process has been the application of research findings to the products and services that would benefit the public at large. Along the way, many well-trained African science and technology experts are finding better opportunities elsewhere, the efficiency of research has been weakened, and top-level science and technology education programmes have fallen into disrepair.

ECA has specialized capacity to help African states with science and technology policy, including experience in several national policy dialogues. ECA can also call on appropriate experts through the African Regional Conference on Science and Technology, the Global Commission on Science and Technology, and its own Conference of Ministers.

Proposal Components

Under the proposal, ECA and one or more partners will help selected Member States build and use their own scientific and technological capacity to increase national economic growth, with special emphasis on increasing food supplies, curbing population growth, and protecting the environment. Related work with policy-makers and science and technology leaders in both the public and private sectors will also promote higher education in nurturing needs-based science and technology in Africa.

A Network of Scientists

Under this proposal, ECA and its partners will establish an electronic network through which experts can exchange experiences, locate expertise, and identify potential authors of research studies. The network will connect important indigenous institutions such as the African Academy of Science and the African Foundation for Research and Development. Relevant non-African scientific institutions-for example, the Third World Academy of Science, the Asia-Pacific Centre for Technology Transfer, and the South Centre-will also be invited to come online.

Executive Dialogues

To foster understanding of the issues and stimulate executive-level action on scientific and technological development, ECA and its partners should convene at least one high-level executive forum during the project span. A carefully planned, one-week retreat could bring together people who make decisions on their nation's science and technology policies with top science- and technology-policy experts from several parts of the world. A few key private-sector participants would also be invited.

African policy-makers will be requested to prepare statements on the science- and technology-policy situation in their countries and the decisions facing them. ECA could call on its network of experts to help African participants prepare their presentations.

National Seminars

To reach a consensus on the policies and strategies that further growth of science and technology, ECA proposes a number of national and specialized seminars where participants can share experience and information on sustained growth applications of technology and promoting women in science.

The seminars can benefit from the successful experiences of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and other organizations that have worked on science and technology issues with African policy-makers. ECA's comparative advantage will be to add its own knowledge to such efforts and provide an institutionalized base in Africa for further work in this direction.

One early cooperative effort might bring the Commission into the second phase of work that the Carnegie Corporation is financing with the New York Academy of Science: learning lessons from the United States on how some states have moved from a low to a higher level of science application. The Carnegie Corporation believes that compiling parallel cases of technology from Africa could lead to rich exchanges of applicable experience.

Advisory Services

An important ECA function is to advise Member States on how to expedite and improve science and technology in their own countries. Under this proposal, the partnership will provide expertise to selected countries on putting science and technology programs into action.

South-South Learning

There is strong support for expanding and sharpening South-South exchanges on promoting scientifically based development. Too often such exchanges have been free rides for some participants. ECA believes that all parties will gain more from these exchanges, especially in terms of Asia and Latin America, if ECA works directly with national officials to specify the exact goals of cooperative activities, carefully selects appropriate participants, develops ways to assure careful follow-up, and explores African financial participation in the arrangements. Two-way South-South linkages can be fostered by assuring that participating African countries have done their homework on what they can specifically offer partners. Such arrangements would be worked out in pilot activities under this proposal, with a view to subsequent expansion.

ECA Capacity-Building

ECA's scientific and technical mission during the next three years requires adding several skills to the staff. In addition to adding professional staff, the Commission proposes offering one visiting fellowship a year for three years to three distinguished scholars who will give major lectures, undertake policy studies, organize staff seminars, and help guide work. ECA also would like to offer one-year internships to qualified graduate students. Special efforts will be made to involve women in these job and career opportunities.

To carry out this proposal, a senior-level advisory group of eminent experts in fostering science- and technology-led development could help strengthen networks throughout Africa and beyond, and advise ECA on the operation and growth of this activity.

Expected Results

Selected Member States will receive the tools and advice needed to position science and technology more appropriately in national policies ranging from commercializing research results to establishing and maintaining a reservoir of national talent.

African scientists and technologists will be able to connect with each other more

effectively and quickly.

ECA will be in a better position to advise other African countries on fostering science and technology.

Partners' Contribution

Over the long run, the science and technology part of ECA's work has the potential to become a core programme by itself. For the next few years, however, the aim is to establish a record of proven strategies, influence, and impact that warrant consideration of future expansion. Thus, partnerships in this area should start with the long-term optimism and short-term pragmatism suitable to a modest-sized effort with potential for growth.

Partners are sought with experience in influencing science and technology policies, linkages to a broad science and technology community, and a willingness to collaborate on capacity-building issues. The Carnegie Corporation of New York is interested in becoming a partner in this area, providing an excellent start.

Strengthening Development Management

Strengthening African Civil Society for Development and Peace

Many ECA Member States are in a transition from autocracy to democracy, from single-party dictatorships to multi-party pluralism, from

controlled to open economies, and even, in some cases, from open

conflict and civil strife to peace and reconstruction. Throughout this transition, Africa's civil society-that is, the thousands of private-sector and non-governmental organizations springing up-is one force actively tilting the balance in a positive direction.

Some governments see civil society organizations as threats and have imposed onerous rules of registration and regulation. Often civil society organizations defy the odds by continuing to exist in inhospitable political environments. Even in favourable political climates, however, many of these organizations lack the experience and sophistication necessary to be as effective as they could be in promoting peace and development.

ECA has long recognized the potential for peace and development if civil society organizations are given more room in which to operate and the opportunity to acquire additional expertise. Examples of such empowered organizations are now evident in Africa, many of which have worked with ECA. An NGO, for example, brought together the heads of state of the Horn of Africa to agree on humanitarian protocols in times of crisis. NGOs were instrumental in finding the meeting grounds to work out the end of apartheid.

These NGO and other private organization successes led to ECA's development and sponsorship of Africa's first regional meeting on civil society, which produced the historic African Charter for Popular Participation in Development, adopted by ECA's Conference of Ministers and the OAU at their 1990 summit.

Subsequently, ECA has been organizing productive dialogues on creating an enabling environment for civil society. In addition, under the UN System-wide Special Initiative on Africa, ECA has lead responsibility within the UN system for the components involved in enhancing civil society for development and for peace- building.

Proposal Components

ECA wishes to foster cooperative working relationships between governments and civil societies, and between governments and non-governmental organizations. This environment would allow open discussions on policy, development of constructive socio-economic activities, and more realism in relationships between private and governmental organizations. To help achieve these aims, ECA proposes to establish a regional resource centre for building the capacities and networking abilities of indigenous African NGOs. ECA also would foster national dialogues, hold subregional workshops to compare experiences, produce thematic papers and training manuals, and offer technical advice and assistance. Finally, pursuant to the UN Special Initiative, ECA is seeking ways to increase the capacity of civil societies and NGOs to develop workable ways to prevent conflict, build peace, and foster democratic pluralism.

Regional Resource

It is proposed that the regional resource centre devote itself to the Centre for NGOs training and technical assistance needed to build NGO capacity, e.g., develop leaders, link with donor partners, establish liaisons and advocacy relationships with policy-makers, network with other NGOs, and distribute technical information of value to Member States.

Through the centre, NGOs will also receive country-needs assessments; attend national training workshops and subregional and regional workshops; and have access to publications, such as thematic and technical studies.

The centre for NGOs will initially be managed by ECA and evaluated jointly by ECA and NGOs. Thereafter, routine monitoring and evaluation will be the respon sibility of the centre's own NGO board.

Civil Society-Government Discussions

Already known both for its commitment to pluralism and African civil society, ECA would like to partner in this regard with governments and civil societies. This partnership would hold ten national workshops on government-civil society relationships and two subregional workshops to encourage cross-fertilization of ideas. In addition, ECA would publish thematic technical manuals and papers-one possibility is a State of Civil Society in Africa series-and, of course, provide expert technical advisory assistance as needed.

Conflict Prevention and Peace-Building

ECA and its partners would work with three outstanding subregional civil groups devoted to peaceful resolution of national, communal, and religious conflicts and disputes; they are the African Leadership Forum, Inter-Africa Group, and the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes. The groups would sponsor studies that identified potential sources of conflict with a view to containing or resolving conflicts before they happen.

Training on the regional Early Conflict Warning System, already developed by the UN in collaboration with the OAU, would be offered. Annual training sessions, conducted in three of Africa's subregions for selected civil society leaders, will focus on monitoring humanitarian situations, especially for the most vulnerable groups (e.g., women, children, and refugees). Six workshops, two a year in each of three subregions, will be held on specific conflict-resolution problems; a special effort will be made to bring women community leaders to the discussions.

In collaboration with a new NGO regional resource centre and the African Leadership Forum, Inter-Africa Group, and ACCORD, ECA proposes to publish a newsletter highlighting significant developments bearing on regional peace and security, particularly efforts to restore and sustain peace. In addition, ECA's ACW will hold a periodic, possibly annual, conference on women and peace as a follow-up to the Kampala Plan of Action on Women and Peace.

Expected Results

The abilities of indigenous NGOs to alleviate poverty and sustain economic development will be enhanced.

An enabling environment for strong and viable civil societies will strengthen democratic and pluralistic political systems and foster a more open and flourishing economic process.

Leaders at local levels will be empowered to find peaceful, negotiated settlements to their conflicts.

The alliance between NGOs and the UN system will be strengthened, thereby increasing the momentum of development and peace issues at regional and global levels.

Partners' Contribution

Partnerships are sought to expand a small, but well-established, programme of support to Africa's civil society. Indeed, with the help of existing partnerships with the Government of Germany, plans in this area are fairly advanced. But there is still considerable room for innovation and combining of experiences. For example, it is anticipated that OAU staff will be involved in the peace-building component of this core programme, sharing their experience and the benefits from their unique networks.

The new NGO centre can also serve a number of international organizations interested in increasing self-help efforts by African NGOs. The centre's planned network of NGOs throughout Africa will help donors efficiently reach the NGO communities they wish to reinforce.

Strengthening Development Management

Reviving Private Investment in Africa

More than a decade of economic reforms in Africa has fostered a new and growing awareness among policy-makers about the merits of increasing private-sector participation in the economy, with a corresponding reduction in the role of the state in the productive sector.

This recognition-indeed consensus-that the private sector should take a lead role in Africa's development, with the government providing the enabling environment, has sparked considerable interest in reviving private investment in African countries.

This renewed interest has been driven by several considerations. Private investment plays a vital role in increasing economic growth, employment, and income, with foreign direct investment, in particular, an important source of resource- and skills-transfer. Private investment is also a major way to increase African exports. In addition, private investment is an increasingly important development resource today because many African countries face severe budget constraints, a decline in official development assistance, and a persistent debt overhang, all of which minimize public investment for development.

Africa offers many opportunities for investment. But the continent's attractiveness as a destination for investment has been hampered by several factors-for example, the perception of the continent as a region riddled with conflicts, poor economic policies, and inadequate legal and regulatory frameworks for protecting investment.

The combination of economic reforms and political liberalization in the region, however, has helped reduce these problems. Recognizing the vast potential for investment on the continent, the Economic Commission for Africa, in conjunction with several co-sponsors, convened an international conference under the theme, Reviving Private Investment in Africa: Partnerships for Growth and Development.*Meeting in June 1996, the conference, which included CEOs of major international corporations and heads of African states, underlined the importance of private-sector development and called on international and regional organizations to launch activities that could revive private investment on the continent. This proposal is a follow-up to the conference.

Proposal Components

Successfully stimulating and sustaining private investment, both domestic and foreign, is dependent on a number of factors. Among the more important are sound macro-economic policies, efficient economic infrastructures, laws that facilitate creation of private enterprise, effective and efficient capital markets, an agile investment promotion agency, strong partnership between the public and private sector, and a supportive legal and regulatory framework for investment.

The task of creating a business environment that meets all these conditions falls primarily on African governments. Various international organizations are working with African governments in support of this effort. But much remains to be done to create a more market- and investor-friendly climate on the continent. Taking the situation into account, ECA will focus on three major areas of concern: assisting African governments to formulate and implement policies for investment promotion, organizing country investors fora, and supporting privatization efforts in Africa.

Promoting Investment

ECA will use a three-pronged approach to support governments in formulating and implementing policies that attract foreign investment. First, ECA will help review laws and regulations for investment and suggest revisions. The aim will be to encourage governments to eliminate laws and regulations, including administrative procedures, that impede investment promotion. Second, ECA will facilitate interactions among African investment promotion agencies so they can share experiences. Indeed, a key follow-up to the international conference on reviving private investment in Africa is setting up a meeting of heads of investment promotion agencies after one year to assess the progress that African countries have made in implementing the conference recommendations. Third, ECA will disseminate information within and outside the region on the best practices for stimulating private investment.

Country Investors Fora

A major objective of the international conference on reviving private investment in Africa was raising the awareness of the international investment community about the investment opportunities in various sectors on the continent. Private investment has traditionally concentrated on the mineral and other natural resources sector in Africa. However, the deeper economic reforms, with their emphasis on privatization, have opened many new areas for private investment. There is significant investment potential and opportunity in such sectors as infrastructure (e.g., telecommunications, electric power, transport) as well as in the financial services, agribusiness, and manufacturing sectors.

To build on the momentum generated by the conference on private investment, ECA will organize country investors fora at which investment opportunities in individual countries can be explored. These fora would bring foreign investors, local entrepreneurs, and government policy-makers together to discuss specific investment proposals and the means to facilitate their implementation.

Privatization

Although uneven in any given country or the region as a whole, the scope of privatization of state-owned enterprises in Africa has widened. For example, several African countries have now extended privatization to public infrastructural enterprises; many are using management contracts, leasing arrangements, and various forms of concessions such as Build-Own-Operate and Build-Operate-Transfer to manage public enterprises.

With policy-makers and investors increasingly looking to privatization as a way to attract foreign investment, ECA will undertake various activities to facilitate the process in Africa. Thus, it will co-sponsor some of the fora convened by the African Privatization Network. This network brings together heads of national privatization agencies in Africa, policy-makers, and experts to exchange views and promote mutual cooperation in implementing privatization programmes. ECA would also compile best practices on privatization and disseminate the results through the network.

Expected Results

African countries will review and revise their investment policies and practices to make their countries more attractive to investment.

Agencies of Member States promoting investment in Africa will benefit from learning about best practices and each other's experiences, both negative and positive.

Fora for investors will create networks and spread the word about investment

opportunities in each country and start increasing the flow of private investment.

The African Privatization Network will be better able to share privatization experiences.

Partners' Contribution

Partnerships forged among the co-sponsors of the international conference on reviving private investment in Africa include UN agencies and multilateral financial institutions who laid the groundwork for implementing this proposal. In addition to international organizations, ECA seeks collaboration with bilateral donors in fielding advisory missions to help Member States reform their legal and regulatory framework for investment promotion. Partnerships will also be sought in organizing the country investors fora to identify market investment opportunities in individual African countries. ECA will encourage potential and present investors in Africa, in particular, to co-sponsor some fora. ECA will also collaborate with the African Privatization Network in organizing fora on privatization in Africa and on studies of best practices and strategies for privatization, disseminating the findings to Member States.

Strengthening Development Management

Mobilizing Africa's Capital Markets

Evidence of a positive relationship between the development of capital markets (i.e., stock markets, pension funds, and other financial services such as banking and insurance) and economic growth is increasing. Well-functioning financial markets allow funds to be channelled towards the most productive uses.

In June 1996, at a conference led by ECA and many public- and private-sector groups, an African Capital Markets Forum was announced.* The forum will identify problems with establishing and developing African capital markets, formulate ways to solve the problems, provide independent advice, promote research and training, maintain a database, and serve as a focal point for information exchange on capital markets in Africa and abroad. The membership will be security regulatory bodies, stock exchanges, market operators, and governments seeking to foster such institutions.

Indeed, the importance of financial and capital markets and their role in providing capital is increasingly acknowledged in Africa. As African capital markets gain depth and liquidity, initially through improving the financial infrastructure and regulatory systems, the continent will be well positioned to attract foreign investment.

Privatization is an important component of economic reform in Africa, and part of the urgency for developing capital markets on the continent comes from privatization of state-owned enterprises. Capital markets allow large-scale privatization programmes to be undertaken in politically transparent and economically viable ways.

Proposal Components

The focus of this proposal will be on training operators in capital markets, providing advisory services and technical assistance to Member States, supporting joint studies in areas requiring action to foster capital markets, and fostering regional cooperation.

Capital Markets Training

ECA will hold workshops, seminars, and courses to train government officials involved in promoting and regulating capital markets and private-sector market representatives such as stockbrokers, dealers, and operators of investment funds and unit trusts. Internships will also be available for this purpose. Trainers would come from organizations and institutions involved in capital markets in Africa, Europe, North America, Latin America, and Asia. Enhancing the capacity of African universities to train students in these matters, particularly in modern quantitative methods of pricing securities, will also be part of the programme, and include training in the derivatives markets (e.g., options, futures, and forwards). This advanced training foresees the time when the full-scale development of African capital markets demands new instruments for more efficient risk-sharing among investors and the hedging of risks.

Advisory Services

Advisory services to Member States will focus on the development and evolution of capital markets, regulatory issues, and legal frameworks for capital markets and the kinds of environments that make for viable and vibrant capital markets. Advisory services will also promote the development of mutual funds and trusts and wider capital market access for small investors.

Joint Studies

A network culled by ECA from policy centres in Africa, partner institutions, and internationally recognized experts could study the development of capital markets. This research would look at the conditions necessary for capital markets, the development of a regulatory framework for capital markets, and the establishment of subregional stock markets.

Regional Cooperation

The objective of the African Capital Markets Forum launched in 1996 is to promote the establishment of formal capital markets in Africa, accelerate the development of existing markets, promote cooperation among African capital market institutions, and serve as a forum where African capital market institutions can exchange ideas. ECA will provide support to the African Capital Markets Forum and subregional associations and promote increased communications among principal participants in the markets and associations.

Expected Results

Participating African countries will receive help in developing, administering, operating, and regulating capital markets.

Capital markets operators and regulators in Africa will be trained in modern capital markets instruments and new techniques of supervision.

Capital markets operators and regulators will be able to share experiences and build linkages for economies of scale.

Partners' Contribution

Establishment of the African Capital Markets Forum set the stage for collaboration to promote Africa's capital markets. As these markets are created or grow, they should attract a wide range of international investors who otherwise would not have the protection and relative ease of investing through organized markets. ECA now needs partners to help the forum gather the information, expertise, and resources to operate effectively.

Partners in this effort are also invited to join ECA in providing country services, building capacities at ECA through fellowships and internships, and helping organize specialized papers or panels for the forum.

Harnessing Information for Development

Building the African Information Society

Starting with the establishment of the Pan-African Development Information System in 1980, ECA has been promoting development information management and exchange systems throughout Africa.

Now ECA is dedicated to the use of information technology to accelerate the socio-economic development of the African region. The major task of ECA's new Development Information Services Division, which started operation on 1 January 1997, is implementation of the African Information Society Initiative. AISI began with the Regional Symposium on Telematics in Africa, organized by ECA in Addis Ababa in April 1995. This exciting gathering brought together more than 350 advocates of electronic communication in Africa. They recommended to the ECA Conference of Ministers that ECA develop an action framework to guide African policy-makers in adopting policies to bring the Information Age to Africa. The Conference of Ministers then asked ECA's Executive Secretary to form a group to draft an action plan for African states in this area.

The AISI establishes this framework for building information and communication infrastructure in Africa. It has been endorsed by the African Ministers of Telecommunications (May 1996); the Information Society and Development Conference, a conference in South Africa of forty-four developed and developing countries (May 1996); the OAU Summit of Heads of State and Government (July 1996); and the UN System-wide Special Initiative on Africa, as well as a spectrum of multilateral, bilateral, and non-government partners.

Proposal Components

Under this proposal, ECA is interested in working with partners to advise and encourage African governments to adopt policies that promote an information and communication infrastructure by coordinating the AISI; helping African institutions develop the information content (the 'infostructure'); making development information available through new information technologies; and working with twenty countries to develop National Information and Communication Infrastructure (NICI) plans. ECA and its partners will build on ECA's fifteen years of technology networking experience to disseminate best practices, new techniques, and standards in development information. To this end, ECA will require some strengthening of its own capacities.

National Policy Workshops

ECA would organize national policy and sectoral workshops to heighten policy-makers' awareness of the development advantages of information technology and also disseminate best practices from the region. Issues will include freedom of in-formation, tariffs, and telecommunications monopolies, among others. A key feature of these workshops will be developing NICI plans and viewing information tech nology demon strations, including sector applications and the Internet.

Training

Training modules to be disseminated in print and through other media will be produced to explain the importance of the AISI. They will also be used for courses for planners given by ECA's African Institute for Economic Development and Planning (Dakar). They will also be distributed to the ECA development information network and other institutions in the region.

The AISI is being widely disseminated throughout Africa and to interested organizations worldwide. The text is going out in both its original and repackaged forms, including translation into the major languages of the region, depending on specific audiences. AISI could also be promoted at major meetings and conferences of sectoral leaders in the region.

Research would be conducted on policies and practices in African countries as well as other developing areas so that African governments could benefit from best practices in information and communications policy.

ECA would coordinate all AISI implementation with its partners through a regional coordinating mechanism set up for this purpose. Leaders of AISI component areas (i.e., policy awareness, research, training, democratizing access to the information society, sector applications, Internet connectivity, NICI plans) would meet semi-annually to review progress and plan future activities.

Successful implementation of AISI requires keeping the organizations involved in this work informed about what is happening. As part of its regional coordination function, ECA will therefore collect data on partner activities relevant to the initiative; make an inventory of sector applications; develop a database (i.e., full text) of proposed projects; and manage electronic dissemination of this information. Other information gathered for dissemination will include information on training initiatives and facilities in the region, centres of excellence, and experts in developing countries. In addition to announcements at semi-annual meetings, information will go out through listservs and Web sites. The assistance of Bellanet, a Canadian partner in AISI implementation that specializes in coordinating information technology, will be crucial.

A gender-balanced, six-member African Technical Advisory Committee, established by ECA's Executive Secretary, will advise the implementing partners on AISI programmes and projects and evaluate results; its members will meet annually.

Infrastructure Plans

ECA and its partners will work with selected African governments to formulate national information and communication infrastructure plans. Governments will decide on priority areas based on national development needs, with emphasis on supporting public-sector decision-making in critical development areas, and providing an information and communication infrastructure for government, business, and society.

Infostructure Plans

Few African institutions have begun to manage their information for electronic dissemination. Unless this situation changes,

information in Africa will come primarily from the North. Thus training modules on building World Wide Web sites and de-veloping African information content must be developed for-and training delivered to-institutions in the ECA development information network so they can distribute their information electronically.

PADIS, together with the Standing Committee on the Harmonization and Standardization of Information Systems in Africa established by ECA in 1989, will disseminate norms and standards of electronic information exchange, develop training modules on African information content, and build Web sites using information technology to access and disseminate development information; CD-ROMs on African development will be produced and distributed through this network.

ECA Capacity-Building

ECA will need more staff to organize policy workshops, develop training modules, and set up and operate the meta-information (i.e., information on information) clearing-house. Internships at information technology centres of excellence in developed and developing countries will be of great value.

Thousands of young Africans have acquired a high level of information-technology skills in developed countries. Many are interested in returning to Africa for a short time to transfer their knowledge. An ECA work programme could establish visiting fellowships that allow some of these young people to work at ECA or with governments and other institutions in the region.

To build capacities in the region, African centres of excellence will be used as advisors in the development of NICI plans and establishment of regional and subregional training courses. National plans will focus on strengthening national institutions in the public and private sectors.

Expected Results

A number of selected Member States will become more aware of the ways that information technology can improve a country's competitive position in the global economy.

All African governments will receive the tools and advice they need to position information and communication technologies more appropriately in national policies.

A number of countries will have NICI plans for using information and communication technologies to accelerate socio-economic development.

At least half of these countries will be ready to prepare NICI plans and implement relevant aspects of the AISI action framework.

Users in Africa connected to the Internet (expected to be in all African countries by the end of this programme cycle) will be able to access development information produced by African institutions. Other parties needing development information will be able to access this information on CD-ROM and in printed format.

One hundred African development institutions will have an increased ability to utilize new information and communication technologies.

Partners' Contribution

Partners are invited to assist ECA with holding national policy workshops (staff costs and funds for organization), developing training modules on the importance of AISI, and providing support for meetings of the African regional coordinating mechanism and the African Technical Advisory Committee for AISI.

ECA also needs partners to help establish a system of AISI information management, formulate NICI plans at country levels, work with Member States to develop online information content, establish a meta-information clearing-house of African information development at ECA, and sponsor participants' travel to meetings of the Standing Committee on the Harmonization and Standardization of Information Systems in Africa.

ECA staff will need training in areas related to AISI at African centres of excellence. Fellowships would encourage highly trained African technical specialists to return to Africa for work. Partners would also be requested to fund an evaluation of AISI activities.

Harnessing Information for Development

Promoting Statistics Development in Africa

During its first session in 1959, ECA called for a reliable flow of data and statistics within and between Member States. More recently, the Addis Ababa Plan of Action for Statistical Development in Africa in the 1990s specifically asked ECA to help these states develop reliable and useful statistical information that would help them plan and carry out their development.

At present, more attention has been paid in Africa to data collection, storage, and report-writing than to quality control, data processing, and production of timely results. Unfortunately, national, political, managerial, and technical constraints make Africa one of the few regions in the world that lacks open access to information.

Proposal Components

This proposal aims at strengthening Africa's statistical database through networking, increased electronic connections, and the establishment of an African database-archive service centre linked to other live databases via technological innovations. By so doing, ECA will help reduce duplication of efforts, identify discrepancies between various sources of data, ensure consistency of data, and greatly enhance the value of the statistics compiled for each country's Year 2000 census.

The Coordinating Committee on African Statistical Development has been established, with ECA as its Secretariat, to undertake statistical activities within the framework of the Addis Ababa Plan of Action for Statistical Development of Africa in the 1990s. ECA will provide support to make the committee client-oriented and more directly involved with its partners in the effort.

Electronic Networking

ECA will establish an electronic network through which Member States can receive the advisory services and technical assistance they need to improve their statistical capabilities. The network will involve indigenous institutions and experts from national statistical offices and renowned African research centres. It will also involve relevant non-African institutions that can provide access to international statistical experts.

Forum on Free Flow of Data

Scheduled to meet one or more times during the three years covered by this proposal, this forum will feature policy-makers, partners, entrepreneurs in informatics, experts from Africa and abroad, and representatives from the private sector. The public-private interest it rouses will help provide the impetus for the free flow of reliable information all over Africa.

System of National Accounts

ECA will advise Member States on how to expedite and improve the quality of their national statistical databases and dissemination of their data. ECA will pay special attention to selected Member States and provide an expert for each state on how to implement the 1993 System of National Accounts agreed to by all African countries.

Field-Test Concept Standards

Using the selected Member States, ECA will field-test ways of standardizing concepts and experiment on cost-effective methods to ensure quality control. ECA will then disseminate the results of the field-test and experiments to assure the best practices in statistical systems for all Member States.

Seminars and Workshops

ECA proposes holding one regional workshop and two seminars during the three years of this proposal. Participants will share their experiences on the sustained flow of information and open access to information via electronic means. These meetings will raise awareness of statistical needs and help African countries reach consensus on appropriate policies and strategies that ensure public access to reliable information.

New Products with Partners

ECA will develop new statistical data products in workshops with partners like the German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ) and the Munich Centre for Advanced Training in Applied Statistics Tailored for Developing Countries. It has also been proposed that ECA develop an African socio-economic data archive with institutions such as the Socio-economic Data Centre at the University of Sussex.

Upgrade Staff Skills

ECA would augment staff strengths through fellowships and internships. In six-month visiting fellowships, two distinguished economist-statisticians can strengthen lectures; organize training, seminars, and workshops; and undertake studies.

Expected Results

Africa's policy-makers will better understand the benefits of open access to data.

Reliable statistical data will start to flow more freely inside Africa and to the rest of the world.

ECA will be in a better position to advise African countries on how to exchange information electronically.

African countries will have received both the information and expertise necessary to gather and disseminate reliable, fully comparable census statistics for the year 2000.

Partners' Contribution

Partnership is specifically invited to build upon the agreements by African states to seriously address fundamental statistical issues. In past decades, a number of Africa's international partners have helped assure that census data were collected. As the year 2000 approaches, it is particularly urgent that statistical systems be more systematically strengthened for the tasks ahead, including the census.

Partners who can bring experience and comparative insight will be particularly valuable in jointly operating programmes, providing national advisory teams, and helping locate and support distinguished fellows and worthy interns. As indicated, it is expected that institutional partnerships will involve, but not be limited to, the Munich Centre for Advanced Training in Applied Statistics and the University of Sussex.

Promoting Regional Cooperation and Integration

Linking African States Through Efficient, Reliable Transportation Systems

An efficient transport network within Africa is a prerequisite for effective economic cooperation and integration and development of agriculture, industry, and trade. Over the years, ECA, in collaboration with the United Nations and African intergovernmental organizations, has helped Member States implement programmes to improve in-country transportation and cross-border transport.

Proposal Components

The emphasis in this proposal will be to improve the efficiency, quality, and coverage of transport services in Member States and enhance regional transport linkages. Attention will be given to building Member States' capacity to manage these sectors, establishing indicators to monitor sector performance, promoting the implementation of multi-country agreements, and the networking and dissemination of best practices. Special attention would also go to strengthening ECA's own capacity to assist Member States in these areas.

Institutional Development

ECA intends to provide training for trainers and managers on transport management issues, technical assistance on a regulatory framework for inter-country transport systems, and promotion of private-sector participation.

Performance Improvement

ECA could initiate a pilot project to promote electronic networking on the Internet about transport issues and identify and disseminate best practices through publications and workshops. These approaches should foster interchange between African experts and policy-makers on operational experiences and research outcomes. ECA will also compile and maintain a roster of African experts in the field.

ECA would sponsor workshops for participants from Member States on the cost-effective application of modern transportation technologies in Africa, establishment of the legal and regulatory framework, and promotion of private-sector participation in transportation.

A senior policy forum could review emerging issues on African transport development and promote private-sector participation. Participants will include private-sector representatives, transport-sector ministers, African and international experts, representatives of African development organizations, and international donors. The forum will also hold an exhibition on transport technology relevant to Africa.

ECA will collaborate with the World Bank to extend urban transport development programmes under the Sub-Saharan African Transport Programme (SSATP) to four more African countries. ECA's contribution would include policy research on specific sector issues and dissemination of best practices through seminars and workshops.

Regional Linkages

The Commission will promote harmonization of transport-sector policies within subregional economic groups and implementation of transit agreements. A survey on implementing transit agreements in selected transport corridors and development of guidelines for implementing such agreements should raise awareness of the need to improve transportation links in the seventeen existing traffic corridors in Africa. The Commission will also sponsor subregional workshops on transport.

The Third African Road Safety Congress will promote road safety and environmental protection. Special reference will be made to developing integrated approaches to road safety programmes. The congress will also focus on child and pedestrian safety in urban areas. Recommendations from the proceedings will be used to assist Member States and subregional organizations implement their road safety programmes, with emphasis on the legal framework for inter-country road transport.

ECA wants to establish a transport database on the lessons learned from the ECA-World Bank pilot effort on national transport statistical development under SSATP. The Commission's long-term objective would be to establish a regional transport database at ECA to facilitate the monitoring of transport-sector performance in Africa and standardize and harmonize national transport databases. Planned activities include disseminating the achievements of the pilot programme being conducted with the World Bank; consulting with relevant institutions working on similar initiatives in Africa; convening an expert meeting on transport performance indicators; and designing and implementing transport database systems in selected pilot countries.

ECA will assist Member States with implementing the Road Maintenance Initiative (RMI) under SSATP. In particular, the Commission will help organize two subregional seminars on

the RMI.

In partnership with African and international institutions, the Commission would also offer staff training programmes on transport policy issues and management approaches. Training will include study tours.

Expected Results

Member States will learn about the best practices to date in transport management and operations.

Adoption of transport policies by pilot countries will lay the base in those countries for improving transport efficiency and promoting private participation.

A number of Member States will increase their capacity for transport infrastructure management.

ECA staff will be able to provide better technical and policy guidance to Member States.

Partners' Contribution

Partnership with African centres, subregional organizations, and the World Bank will be an important feature of this proposal. Partnership is invited to co-sponsor the planned high-level meetings, technical seminars, and workshops on transport management and operations. The partners' contribution could include resource persons who can provide input to these events and prepare conference background papers, and public agencies and private corporations that can co-sponsor the transport technology exhibition.

Partners who can bring expertise and help identify best practices for networking and dissemination, develop training modules for ECA in-house training, and co-sponsor study tours are crucial. Private-sector partners and public agencies with expertise and in-country programmes related to African urban transport development and manufacturing of transport equipment are especially welcome.

Cross-cutting Theme

Fostering Leadership and Empowerment for Women in Africa

Women make up 51 percent of Africa's population; in most countries they dominate food production. Research and experience prove that investing in this large productive group is the best way to promote social and economic development in general.

Overall in Africa, however, significant gender gaps persist in access to social services. On the continent, more girls than boys die before they reach age five. African women suffer greater incidence of morbidity than African men. School enrolment rates for girls are less than those for boys. More than half the women in Sub-Saharan Africa over 25 years of age are illiterate.

Official and cultural barriers also restrict women's access to economic assets, especially in land ownership and finance. Many African countries have a poor record of providing extension services to female farmers. Credit for women is limited, often due to lack of acceptable collateral (i.e., land), legal obstacles, and red tape tied to gender differences. In some societies, only men own property, and family inheritances go solely to males.

Neither do African women share equitably in worldwide gains in social services. They often receive sub-standard health care and education. Maternal mortality rates are still staggering. It is not uncommon for little girls to receive less food and health care than boys do. Female enrolment rates in school lag behind those of boys. School drop-out rates are persistently higher for girls than for boys in many areas, especially in primary grades.

Often, women do not understand how the law can serve as a tool for social change. They need access to critical information on legal rights and on such human rights as reproductive rights and freedom from violence. They need better representation in policy-making circles.

However, despite cultures, traditions, and official policies that often discourage women from being responsible for important decisions or seeking public office, progress made by some African countries implies that, given increased momentum, gender equity can also become a reality elsewhere.

ECA has a good track record of commitment to gender equity and partnering with other organizations in Africa to achieve equity. The Commission first introduced gender issues into its agenda in 1972; its African Centre for Women, originally a training and research organization, was established three years later. Then, for 20 years, the ACW, with only a small staff, initiated and supported gender efforts continent-wide, particularly promoting subregional women's organizations, entrepreneurial activities, and women's and girls' rights. In 1994, ACW expanded its work to reflect wider socio-economic concerns posed by gender issues, using seminars, publications, and networking as its primary tools for information exchange.

Proposal Components

To emphasize the importance of gender equity as a development tool, ECA has now brought ACW into the Office of the Executive Secretary, and is increasing the professional staff from five to ten. As ECA's renewal gets underway, gender considerations will start to cut across every programme ECA is undertaking.

As part of this cross-cutting work toward gender equality, ECA will also launch a comprehensive, three-year Leadership and Empowerment Programme for Women in Africa. The programme will sensitize African governments to the overall welfare loss in well-being and the social inequities that arise from barriers to women's access to social services and economic assets; the effort will also advocate national strategies that can enhance women's participation in Africa's economic transformation and development.

The programme's three major components are to build around the Leadership Fund for African Women; conduct high-level work to promote implementation of the Global Platform of Action and Africa's Platform of Action; and mainstream gender in all aspects of the Commission's work.

The Leadership Fund for African Women

The World Bank has granted ECA US $1 million over a three-year period to establish an exciting new activity: The Leadership Fund for African Women. Operating within the African Centre for Women, the fund will reinforce ECA's gender programmes by preparing women for leadership tasks in development, human and legal rights, and economic decision-making.

The World Bank grant is contingent upon receiving additional resources in a ratio of 6:1, which could bring the leadership fund to a total of US $7 million over the three-year period. Patrons supporting the Leadership Fund for Women will have the opportunity to participate in a bold effort to improve the map of leadership in Africa. The effort will involve intellectual, strategic, political, and financial cooperation. Already, commitments from the Governments of the Netherlands, Korea, and Japan are slated to cover part of the match.

Leadership of women in decision-making. The fund can help train local women who demonstrate leadership potential, especially on issues where women's voices could be crucial. ACW advisors, for example, could meet in member countries with local civil service authorities, management groups, and policy-makers to advise on bringing women into leadership positions. As groups of women become well-placed in positions of influence, they in turn will advocate more leadership roles for women. Frequently teaming with other organizations, the fund will also promote networking among African women at middle and higher levels of management.

Economic empowerment of women. Women make up 60 to 80 percent of Africa's labour force and produce 75 percent of the continent's food. Investing in African women is therefore a sound economic decision, essential to reducing poverty and promoting growth in the continent.

Returns to investments in women's education and health are significantly greater than those for similar investments in men. This is largely because of the strong interaction between women's schooling, health, nutritional status and fertility, on the one hand, and on the other, the synergistic effect of this interplay on Africa's education, health, and productivity tomorrow.

The leadership fund, therefore, will synthesize and disseminate best practices on promoting female access to social services and productive economic assets. The fund will also sponsor subregional meetings where senior policy-makers can become aware of the economic and social barriers that stand in the way of women's full participation in economic activities. Gender-analysis training will be offered to African policy-makers and analysts.

Building on its own and its partners' networks and training centres (e.g., the African Federation of Women Entrepreneurs and the Pan-African Institute for Development-Eastern and Southern Africa), ECA will help women develop entrepreneurial and management skills, as well as the skill to train others. Female entrepreneurship will be encouraged through seminars and showcasing woman's products at trade fairs. Study tours are also proposed for 1997 and 1999, the first of which will focus on lessons learned in helping women in subsistence situations become commercial entrepreneurs.

Human and legal rights for women. The Leadership Fund for African Women will advocate legal reforms to remedy inequities that impede development. Initial emphasis will be on advancing legal literacy among women, instituting equitable management of community legal services, and advising governments on women's rights. These priorities call for training African legal professionals, NGO leaders, community groups, women's groups, and the media about accelerating rights for women. ACW will also enter into formal arrangements with other organizations (e.g., OAU) to enlist men to become leaders in the case for women's rights.

In 1999, an ECA-sponsored regional forum will take place on women's legal and human rights; attendees will be parliamentarians, government policy-makers, NGOs and other civil society groups, and experts on women's rights. The forum would promote regional dialogue on legal issues related to women, including the discrepancy between the written law and its implementation; contradictions between traditional and modern civil laws; and legal and administrative reforms needed to assure rights for women. Other features of the programme might include research and advisory services around specific issues, such as the promotion of legal literacy for women.

Carrying Out Beijing

ECA is in an excellent position to accelerate implementation of the agreements reached at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing and its preparatory regional meetings. The Global and Regional Platforms of Action, which came out of these meetings, each invest ECA with responsibility for promoting women in Africa's development. And indeed, virtually all

current and proposed ECA activities on gender support these platforms, which provide a useful point of entry for accelerating women's progress in general. ECA and its partners, therefore, will undertake the following three actions to reinforce their overall work on gender equality.

Platforms and dialogues. ACW could engage prominent women to promote the Global and Regional Platforms through public advocacy and private high-level dialogues. Prominent spokespersons for women's rights, such as the Secretary-General of the Beijing Conference (a leading African), can serve as ECA Distinguished Visiting Fellows for this purpose. It is proposed that other outstanding women come to key regional and subregional meetings to discuss the Global and Regional Platforms and the way both African states and societies at large can carry out the plans.

Information on women's status. In consultation with UNIFEM and others, ECA hopes to devise national indicators for monitoring progress being made in carrying out the platforms. These indicators would be reviewed by experts and circulated within Africa. Generating, compiling, and disseminating gender-disaggregated statistics for use in analysis and research will be a high priority for ECA. In addition, data banks on women would be promoted, starting with a roster of women experts and professionals in Africa, a directory of African women's organizations, and profiles on the status of women in each country. ECA will work to ensure regular reporting on the status of women in Africa.

ECA will use its internal publications and mass media to keep interested parties in touch with emerging issues and suggest remedies for economic barriers to women's progress, including viable strategies for business development and access to credit.

ACW's treasure trove of gender-related information on Africa is being transferred to ECA's library. Most of the material will eventually be available on ECA's computerized information outreach systems.

National mechanisms. To support follow-up on the Global and Regional Platforms, ECA will appraise the capacity of different mechanisms to determine whether and how these mechanisms could be strengthened. ECA will also provide advisory services to national entities concerned with women's progress, and promote information exchange and technical services on best practices for implementing the plans.

Mainstreaming Gender in ECA's Programme

To make sure ECA itself lives up to the principles of gender- equality it is mapping for others, ECA is committed to making all its programmes and staffing more equitable. ACW will provide operational and policy support to the other programme areas in ECA to integrate gender concerns in their work programme. ACW will also help identify gender experts in specific fields who can provide specialized services in the substantive programme areas.

ACW will bring ECA professional staff up to date on gender analysis and the application of gender analysis to development. All ECA staff, including professional, human-resources management, and support personnel, will attend sensitization-training workshops and receive technical training appropriate for their jobs. Selected staff will supplement this training with study tours to institutions with successful gender-mainstreaming practices applicable to ECA. Some of these initial students will move on to become trainers both within ECA and in the field. Many of these activities will be conducted in tandem with PAID-ESA (which trains trainers) and other African institutes, as well as leading international organizations such as the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Expected Results

Gender issues will be mainstreamed into all ECA programmes.

Achieving gender balance in the workplace and bringing women into leadership positions will become an established norm throughout ECA and will increase in Member States.

The Global and Regional Platforms of Action will become a high-priority item on national agendas.

A significantly large number of African women with leadership potential will be

identified.

A regular flow of reports on the status of women in Africa--all linked to the goals of the two platforms--will be established.

The major regional and multilateral organizations in Africa will participate in collaborative programmes that champion the Global and Regional Platforms.

Partners' Contribution

ECA has many established partnerships on gender programmes; it now wants to enhance existing relationships and build new alliances through cooperative planning and collaboration on programme implementation.

• At the organization-to-organization level, there is a need to formalize networking so that expertise can be linked for shared tasks.
• At the regional and national levels, there is a need to create regular consultations and make commitments to work regularly in synergy.
• At the international level, there exists the opportunity to widen perspectives and generate creative support from outside the continent for women in Africa.

At these three levels of collaboration are opportunities for jointly analysing issues affecting women's progress in Africa, sponsoring national and regional workshops, supporting distinguished fellowships, and providing platforms to noted personalities who can influence policy-makers to take actions that promote gender equity and create conditions for women to mobilize on their own behalf.

Special Dimensions

Networking to Provide Economic and Social Policy Advice in Africa

Advancing South-South Cooperation

In this era of economic and structural reforms, African states more than ever require sophisticated, relevant, and quickly available advisory services. The economic and social policy area, in particular, is involved with high-stake issues that affect all development in African countries and require special responses.

Africa's usual method of coming up with such responses, however, still depends to an unnecessary degree on external, non-African advisors. There may have been a logic to this state of affairs in an earlier era, but Africa's capabilities have since grown markedly, and can now help enable the states to become more self-sufficient in making choices.

Demands for economic advisory services are particularly acute when negotiating with external parties, especially the Bretton Woods institutions. The World Bank, the IMF, and now the WTO have enormous influence over the course of economic development. States often feel overwhelmed when trying to negotiate such vital issues as debt reform, structural adjustment, and trade access. Often, they consider reforms recommended by these outside parties to be unduly imposed on them.

What is needed are advisory services that address the problems, not in the 1980s sense of confrontation, but in the spirit of finding workable solutions that can be locally owned. Although Member States need the answers as quickly as possible, the recommendations must be those that they are so comfortable with that they will act upon them.

ECA has offered policy advice to Member States for many years through an active, senior-level, multidisciplinary advisory group. But the Commission realizes that a much more insightful deployment of advisory services targeted at the core issues of economic and social policy could be developed by drawing upon ECA's expanding relationships and the talents found largely within Africa and its diaspora. Heads of leading policy networks who participated in the recent consultative meetings on ECA's future were enthusiastic over the prospect of collaborating with ECA on furnishing economic policy advice to Member States.

Proposal Components

This proposal calls for establishment of networks on Africa's economic and social policies, and use of the networks primarily to provide policy advisory services and establish a base for other collaborative efforts.

Network Participants

Drawing heavily upon what many believe to be Africa's most successful policy network-the African Economic Research Consortium, which has shared its methods of operations with ECA-the Commission will identify potential network partners, negotiate relationships, facilitate relationships, and undertake joint work with the four most promising sources of talent for the tasks.

1. Regional centres of policy expertise within Africa, such as AERC in Nairobi, CODESRIA in Dakar, and the Economic Research Forum in Cairo. They can help ECA identify experts from their rosters and also have the ability to organize or co-organize, manage, and assure the quality of advisors. The best of these centres are experienced in operating networks and high-quality programmes, and are eager to see their work better accepted. ECA has already begun working with selected centres, and ECA and AERC have held a joint workshop on economic integration issues.

2. National policy and research centres in Africa. They can provide insight into local situations, report quickly on these situations, and compile best practices. They also can serve as bases for local outreach for ECA's work.

3. Individual experts of outstanding ability in Africa and abroad, not associated with networks, including those in the African diaspora. They can provide peer experience and high-level professional perspectives to leading policy-makers.

4. Policy centres of excellence in policy work outside of Africa, many built up over the years by specific donors. They can be looked to for advice on newer methodologies and technologies for analysis, an inter-regional overview of best practices, and help on capacity-building.

Economic and Social Policy Advice

The networking process envisioned by ECA would bring in advisors to help African states in such areas as

• Identifying paths for economic recovery.
• Determining trade, finance, and macro-economic policy options and courses to be pursued, and managing economic policy tasks.
• Examining the nature and effectiveness of aid.
• Determining the appropriate balance between primary, secondary, and university education.
• Analysing user fees and cost recovery for education, health, agriculture, and other public services.
• Increasing the effectiveness of incentives for productive work by African civil servants.
• Examining the informal savings arrangements and the factors inhibiting savings in the formal financial sector.
• Preparing budgets, including specific expenditure and revenue issues; holding budget reviews and making necessary adjustments when budgets do not go according to plan; and proposing corrective actions.
• Preparing for meetings (e.g., debt discussions at the Paris and London clubs and with other creditors; adjustment, programme, and project negotiations with the World Bank or IMF; and trade discussions with the WTO).
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Other Collaborative Efforts

All four sources of talent are also potential collaborators on conducting research, identifying distinguished fellows who would use ECA as a platform for discussions on policy issues, and publishing studies jointly. Some of the partners may also be useful collaborators in other aspects of ECA's work such as research, workshops, conferences, and capacity-building.

Expected Results

African states will receive high-quality, reliable, and efficient services on policy matters that are important to them and come from sources they trust.

Working relationships will be established with centres of expertise not only to provide service to Member States, but increasingly to take on other joint ECA projects involving research, workshops, conferences, and capacity-building tasks.

Partners will be strengthened through association with high-level tasks and gain wider recognition of their work throughout Africa.

ECA will receive updated substantive knowledge in a number of areas, establish links that could lead to wider dissemination of ECA's work, and benefit from information exchanges with the networks.

New sources of expertise to help strengthen ECA's capacities will be identified.

Partners' Contribution

ECA invites partners to help respond to Member State requests for economic advice on some of the key policy issues facing Africa. Partnerships probably will be of two types:

• Technical collaborators will combine expertise, typically, with an African centre of policy.
• Facilitators will likely be organizations able to provide financial support and experience on how to best foster network relationships.

Both technical collaborators and facilitators will be invited to help conduct professional searches for appropriate networks that can add expertise in negotiating relationships, exchange information on the best ways to advise and help on macro-economic and social policy issues, and establish ways to provide advisory services at lower costs.

Partners may also be invited to consider sharing a number of important tasks: They might loan top-level experts to help ECA form networks and provide key services; distinguished fellows could serve as advisors and capacity-builders to ECA; and graduate students could serve as ECA interns.

Some partnerships will be informal, some formal. It will be important to spell out these relationships so that mutual expectations are realistic. ECA also contemplates periodic gatherings of network leaders to review the basic course of relationships and discuss how to improve them.

Special Dimensions

Advancing South-South Cooperation

The days of bipolar global politics and alliances have ended; the world economy and political interests have grown more pluralistic. At the same time, developing states feel marginalized by the globalization of economic activities and the perceived withdrawal of Europe and the United States from development efforts.

Therefore, Asian, Latin American, and African states are beginning to look increasingly to each other for economic and commercial cooperation and deeper political relationships. They can build on linkages such as:

• Trade facilitation
• Infrastructure investment
• Entrepreneurship
• Financing of innovations
• Promotion of African international trade
• Macro policy experience
• Environmental policies and programmes
• Human capital development

The concept of South-South cooperation is one of the most promising ideas in the field of development; poorer countries, in particular, could benefit from the experiences of new middle-income countries. In spite of many attempts and much goodwill, however, potential benefits from these linkages have not been as great as anticipated, although the good experiences to date indicate the concept is viable.

Among the reasons: Too many South-South linkages have been ad hoc attempts lacking follow-through; follow-up opportunities, including study tours and learning from best experiences, have not been systematically fostered; and electronic and other modern linkups have not been utilized.

A more pragmatic and focused approach to South-South cooperation could unlock major benefits for Africa. United Nations agencies have agreed that, as the leader of the South-South component of the UN System-wide Special Initiative for Africa, ECA should coordinate such an effort.

A long list of developing countries outside Africa, along with regional institutions around the world, have expressed interest in establishing or improving development and commercial links with Africa. Their areas of mutual interest comprise virtually the spectrum of economic life in Africa, and are addressed in a number of international agreements.

It is, therefore, envisioned that fostering South-South cooperation will be a feature in the Commission's core programmes; lesson-sharing across borders can prove to be a solid and cost-effective way to carry out ECA's work.

Substantial experience in inter-regional cooperation exists. ECA, for example, has carried out several projects utilizing South-South exchanges, including surveys and business tours, technology programmes to improve industrial development and promote small-scale enterprises, and studies to gather ideas on fiscal strategies. In addition, travel tours, joint workshops, and other collaborations have brought about bilateral exchanges with China, India, Indonesia, and South Korea. Some development experts propose that the Indian Ocean RIM cooperating organizations join with the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), and ECA to promote cooperative exchanges.

The UN Economic Commission for Europe has also proposed linkages between Africa and Eastern Europe, particularly to share the experiences of countries in transition.

Proposal Components

This rapidly shrinking world offers myriad opportunities for intra- and inter-regional linkages. By tracking the development of new collaborations and helping African countries to identify new opportunities, ECA and its partners will promote South-South cooperation with creativity and relevance. By exploring the process of inter-regional linkages, Africa's states will be helped to move towards equal exchanges with other developing nations and with each other.

South-South cooperation will be fostered through inter-regional arrangements and bilateral framework agreements made at high national levels. ECA will work within the UN system and with other regional institutions and partnering governments to establish such frameworks.

The UNDP is proposing to assist African countries to identify opportunities for South-South links. Local UNDP offices will help make detailed arrangements for national participation in such collaborations. To accomplish these tasks, ECA will collaborate with the other four UN regional economic commissions to help develop framework agreements for work with other regions; work with UNDP to promote South-South arrangements; and help Africa take advantage of such existing opportunities as Japan's TICAD* programme. The programme promises extensive cooperation between Asia and Africa that accelerates as Africa's reform and performance improve.

A few African regional initiatives will be helped by sharing experiences with regional institutions elsewhere. For example, creating a regional trade and monetary authority in Africa could draw on the experience and expertise of other regional groups like the Southern Cone Common Market (MERCOSUR), the Common Market of the South in Latin America, and the Association of Southeast Nations Free Trade Area. The Economic Commission for Europe believes that fostering cooperation on such subjects as transportation standards in Europe would be relevant to ECA's work on transportation in Africa.

Sharing experience and expertise through joint seminars, consultations, and short-term staff exchanges could improve regional work, boost confidence in the Commission's recommendations, and strengthen ECA institutional capacities.

If future South-South programmes are to be more successful than past efforts, they must have built-in sustainability features. Participants in programmes, therefore, will have a mutual expectation of results. They will work towards maintaining relationships that encourage them to request supplementary advice and receive it.

Demand

Learning from the experience of ESCAP in fostering linkages between its Member States, ECA's services will be demand-based and require local financial contributions. UNDP would define local needs and negotiate responsibilities; ECA would arrange and broker promising linkages with partners and provide follow-through in the 'beneficiary' country.

Supply

ECA recently entered into a framework agreement with the Government of India to foster exchanges with Africa. ECA can help other non-African developing countries identify areas where linkages with Africa can be particularly helpful.

Electronic Linkages

ECA suggests furthering South-South trade information links as part of this proposal. Electronic trade and investment networks offer a major avenue for collaboration. Electronic Trading Opportunities is a computerized business-matching system developed by UNCTAD. At least a dozen African countries have established relationships with this network. ECA is aware of Asia's trade and investment data banks, but must now also take into account those in Latin America and the Middle East.

TICAD

A growing opportunity for Africa is Japan's TICAD initiative. ECA plans to continue and strengthen its participation in TICAD to help channel this effort into areas of benefit to the continent.

Expected Results

Africa will gain from working with other parts of the developing world that now enjoy affordable and relevant technologies and also understand Africa's constraints and opportunities.

Inter-regional, private-sector linkages will grow.

Coordination and rationalization of UN South-South efforts will take place.

Partners' Contribution

ECA is considering setting up a TCDC (Technical Cooperation Among Developing Countries) Supplementary Fund parallel to the successful fund with which ESCAP has helped its Member States. Host or beneficiary nations would shoulder local costs; the fund would help finance international travel.

ECA's coordination of UN-system resources for South-South purposes should help provide new opportunities for Member States. ECA plans to work closely with the proposed UNDP inter-regional TCDC network.

Enhancement of ECA Capacities

Upgrading ECA Capacity in Information and Communications Technology

The need to improve ECA's use of information and communications technology in acquiring, synthesizing, and disseminating information is fundamental to ECA's work, both in terms of ECA's renewal process and its mandated role to lead Africa in the African Information Society Initiative.

Indeed, Member States look to ECA itself as a best-practices role model for applying information and communications technology in all sectors of work. Nearly 80 percent of ECA's staff are information workers involved in the research, production, processing, storage, administration, and dissemination of information. To work efficiently in the Information Age, they need access to up-to-date tools.

ECA, however, lags far behind other offices of the United Nations in availability and use of information and communications technology. Eighty percent of the present computer stock of 650 machines at ECA is obsolete (machines with 386 or slower processors) and, therefore, unable to run industry-standard software. One hundred staff members (professional and administrative support) who should have computers do not have them. The Commission also lacks the infrastructure that would allow wide use of electronic messaging and collaborative computing because its inadequate local area network (LAN) will not support even half of the potential users. ECA also remains alone among major United Nations offices without a direct connection to the Internet.

Proposal Components

This proposal to improve ECA's technology so that its staff can provide better service to Member States would automate ECA's management systems, develop a modern LAN and extend service to every workstation, improve access by automating ECA's library, expand dissemination of information through the World Wide Web, bring in the Internet, develop an Intranet, promote electronic messaging and collaborative computing, automate publications, and introduce a wide range of administrative and substantive informatics applications. ECA's small information and communications technology staff would also be increased, and their skills upgraded.

Upgrading Infrastructure

Upgrading ECA's information and communication infrastructure requires replacing obsolete personal computers with modern office equipment, building a modern LAN, and installing a reliable, secure, high-speed Internet connection. By acquiring up-to-date hardware and software, and connecting all computers to a LAN, ECA will be able to reap the benefits of email and collaborative computing.

Although ECA has an Internet connection through a leased line from the Ethiopian Telecommunications Authority, this bandwidth is insufficient for United Nations use. The United Nations is supplying ECA with a VSAT (very small aperture terminal), and it is hoped that partner assistance will be required only for its installation.

Developing Infostructure

The principal components of 'infostructure development' (that is, use of new technologies to disseminate information) will be an ECA World Wide Web site and an ECA Intranet. The planned Web site could be expanded to be an efficient, low-cost tool for disseminating information about the Commission and making the text of ECA publications available electronically. An Intranet will allow ECA to circulate internal information using the LAN infrastructure for administrative applications, news services, circulars, and in-house information access, including an image bank, the text of ECA publications, and library materials.

Automating Manual Processes

Several areas of the Commission are badly in need of automation-the library, the publications section, the archives, and the management information systems. At present, none of ECA's library functions are automated: The library needs an automation specialist, an integrated library management system software package, and staff training in library automation. The publications sections would be able to reduce staff and increase inventory control by acquiring a digital printing system that allows direct printing from the LAN or a diskette, and has a print-on-demand capability.

ECA also needs a records and archives manager to install a text and image bank of ECA documents and publications. Automation of management information will also require developing systems for such critical areas as payroll and accounting, as well as integration of the systems into one that can be used by senior managers.

Upgrading Staff Skills

ECA is woefully understaffed to carry out the enormous job of building an integrated approach to the use of information and communications technology within the Commission. The addition of several staff members is required; in particular, staff are needed to take charge of the Internet and Intranet connections, to manage the LAN and electronic messaging, and to develop business applications. Current staff would benefit greatly from upgrading their information technology skills.

Expected Results

ECA will be able to perform its tasks more efficiently.

ECA will serve as a model of best practices in technological innovation for its Member States .

ECA will be in a position to help African countries use information and communications technology to overcome a number of development obstacles.

Users of ECA information, both internal and external, will have easier, quicker, and cheaper access to such information.

Partners' Contribution

This proposal is based on recommendations by World Bank experts of the requisite technology for a modern regional institution. Partners from the private and public sector are invited to help ECA with equipment, technology expertise and staffing, both to increase the numbers of skilled staff in this area and to upgrade the skills of those presently on board. In this way, ECA can demonstrate by example the benefits of an African information society, and the application of information technology and information can become ECA's competitive edge.

Enhancement of ECA Capacities

Increasing ECA Capacity Through Staff Training

Human-resource capacity is critical to the operation of an effective organi-zation. In the past, however, ECA training and professional development consisted primarily of a few important seminars and programmes outside Africa attended by a small number of professional staff, and a limited number of administrative and managerial training courses.

The cost-benefit ratio of this approach was extremely low. Working in Addis Ababa also means that staff is not near centres where advanced training in development is available.

Recent expert studies revealed that staff, although well qualified when hired, often have fallen behind in their fields, and need their skills upgraded so they can function effectively in the new ECA environment.

Specifically, the renewed ECA sees itself as undertaking fewer studies and more networking; operating more tightly focused programmes; taking on more complex work projects, which consequently demand team effort; being accountable for measuring individual, team, and organizational performance; bringing cutting-edge expertise in-house; and routinely using more and more modern information and communication technologies.

The commissioned assessments of ECA professional skills and means to upgrade these skills reached the following conclusions: All Commission staff should receive the kind of instruction that keeps them current with ECA's new way of doing business and the issues confronting the Commission. Furthermore, training should be repeated as often as necessary to keep ECA management and their professional and administrative staffs up to date.

Proposal Components

Together, ECA and its partners would make certain that training and professional development courses reach all professional staff and are conducted on an ongoing basis to refresh skills and meet emerging needs.

To achieve maximum cost-effectiveness, ECA will conduct many of the training courses, and also negotiate with other donor and development organizations and higher learning institutions for access to their established training and development resources.

Most training will take place on-site in Addis Ababa, drawing on local and outside experts to conduct training. Distance- and flexible-learning techniques will further increase the cost-effectiveness of training once the appropriate systems for this type of instruction are in place.

ECA trainers will receive instruction on advanced information and communication technologies in work systems and in distance- and flexible-learning. Many contracts with outside experts will include a 'training of trainers' requirement. On-the-job training opportunities will also be fully exploited.

Training

With most of ECA's executive management team, particularly the division chiefs, new to the Commission, the first priority will be to orient them to ECA and their own area work. The chiefs have to coalesce into a senior management team that shares the Commission's new vision, is clearly committed to accomplishing ECA's goals, and is ready to lead the renewal process.

Professional staff will upgrade their knowledge of the state of the art in ECA's substantive work. They will also learn how to improve their research, writing, and presentation skills, and ways to utilize the new information and communication technologies for these purposes.

As the regional arm of the United Nations in Africa, ECA must provide customer-centred support services. To become more efficient and cost-effective, administrative managers and their staffs must develop a client-service orientation; put together effective planning and evaluation procedures for the substantive divisions; create streamlined, technologically advanced, user-friendly, and transparent administrative systems; and provide assistance in resolving work place issues.

Throughout, ECA also must provide staff with cost-effective, flexible learning opportunities.

Organization Expert

Training and development activities alone are not enough to produce and sustain the desired change in organization culture. A development organization expert will, therefore, be available to provide ongoing support to managers and staff members to facilitate change efforts.

Expected Results

An enabling environment will encourage leaders to demonstrate a positive attitude towards change and support the pursuit of professional excellence by all employees.

Opportunities for on-the-job development of leading-edge skills will increase.

Training will build the confidence and competence of managers and staff to operate in the new organizational environment.

Managers and staff will have the information and communication technology tools appropriate to the tasks at hand.

A viable performance management system and more appropriate staffing policies and strategies will be in place.

Partners' Contribution

Partnerships are crucial to opening up opportunities for ECA staff to gain the skills fundamental to the ECA renewal. With the help of partners, it will be possible for ECA to augment existing training programmes, as well as launch exciting new training initiatives. Partners are asked to consider innovative ways to cooperate. The variety of collaborations possible can range from support for distance-learning to the offer of fellowships.

For example, one or more partners could support a visiting group of trainers who would come to Addis Ababa to instruct ECA staff in new technical areas. Some staff might then go on to become trainers themselves, thus amplifying the training effect. It might also be possible for partners to sponsor the enrolment of ECA staff in relevant training programmes already being offered in their own organizations. At other times, an internship or fellowship at a partner organization could help staff members upgrade their skills in particular substantive areas. Long-term training opportunities could be achieved either by seconding experts to ECA over a period of time or, alternatively, by sending ECA staff to work at a partner organization on an area of particular interest.

Special collaboration will be sought to allow a long-term, cost-effective means of training staff through distance-learning techniques. With a well-equipped teaching centre and appropriate technology, ECA could import training materials originating at a number of sources and make them available via computer, video, or film (another area of possible innovation for partners). With such distance-learning materials regularly available, some ECA staff could train at their own pace over a period of time.

Enhancement of ECA Capacities

Communicating Information About African Development

Effective communications through publications and other media is central to the work of the ECA, whose primary mission is to disseminate research and policy analyses to its Member States and other target audiences. To an increasing number of audiences, ECA publications must become the first place to look for facts and ideas on social and economic issues affecting the continent of Africa.

The production and distribution of printed publications continue to be an important way ECA communicates its work to the rest of the world. The publications serve a variety of audiences, including policy-makers in Member States, academics, development organizations, and the public in Africa and elsewhere. ECA already produces a substantial number of publications ranging from technical reports on economic and social policy to press releases, newsletters, and information bulletins. Yet recent studies commissioned by ECA indicate that not all of this output is as focused, as coordinated, or even as essential as it should be.

Proposal Components

ECA plans a new publications process that will ensure higher quality in its technical publications and policy papers, general-interest newsletters, and information bulletins. The process will also harmonize and upgrade the editing, design, and layout processes so that all ECA printed material has a distinctive, consistent, and recognizable style both in look and language usage.

Under this proposal, the disparate ECA services currently responsible for publications, information, and public relations would be placed into three units-information, editing, and publications-under the overall coordination of a senior communications officer reporting directly to the Executive Secretary of ECA. Staff will work closely with the information technology developments and the electronic networking services currently run by ECA's PADIS.

The Information Unit

The restructured information unit will oversee all publications, public information, and media relations work. Staff will provide timely press releases and regular media briefings, ensure that media receive information promptly on request, and supply a spokesperson when necessary. They will also oversee preparation and distribution of a new series of policy papers; a new series of working papers on key issues; ECA newsletters and other general- interest periodicals; and print, video, radio, photo, and multi-media production. The information unit also would collaborate with non-governmental organizations and other agencies in organizing training and orientation workshops and seminars for journalists on topical issues.

The Editing Unit

The editing unit will ensure that every ECA publication meets the highest professional standards for quality and word usage. The unit would comprise both Anglophone and Francophone editors who have excellent writing and editing skills and also strong backgrounds in development issues.

The Publications Unit

The publications unit will be responsible for the design and production of all ECA publications from concept to the preprint stage. This unit would also develop video, slide show, and other media productions.

The ECA Library

To retain its close collaboration with information, editing, and publications, the traditional activities the library now shares to some extent with PADIS will be increasingly integrated and automated. Dissemination and delivery of printed materials would be improved through increased use of electronic distribution and an upgraded delivery system.

Equipment and Facilities

The senior communications officer and staff will have modern equipment and facilities such as projectors, recording equipment, and studios. All communications staff would have full computer workstations appropriately equipped and connected to the LAN, cc-mail, and email.

Expected Results

Member States and other target audiences will receive more relevant, timely, and high-quality economic and social policy information and analyses from ECA.

Publications will be fewer in number but higher in quality and more reader friendly, and have a distinctive house style.

Partners' Contribution

ECA has prepared detailed technical plans to upgrade its communications strategy at each stage, from writing to dissemination. There is strong value added for the renewed ECA if it can reach significantly larger audiences more effectively. Partners are invited to support these improvements by providing experience and resources.

Enhancement of ECA Capacities

Engaging the Public Through the Mass Media

On average, each African country has only one to two radio stations; the situation is even worse for television broadcasting. With a potential audience of one billion people, the advent of low-cost communications technologies and the rise in personal incomes, Africa would seem poised for a surge in radio and television broadcasting capacity.

However, the commercial interests driving any growth in Africa's broadcasting today dedicate only a few resources to public-interest programming. Hundreds of millions of Africans-the people on whom Africa's development depends-remain the hardest to reach with development information.

Getting such information out to most of Africa is more than possible. Indeed, expanding the role of communications can open a new era for African development, in particular, and mass media communication in Africa, in general. Furthermore, it can be accomplished at a reasonable cost.

Under this proposal, ECA and its partners will demonstrate ways in which new technologies can enhance existing broadcast facilities in a cost-effective manner and also help expand mass communications beyond radio and TV. Technology is the least of the problems. Among the larger questions are

• How to find and train qualified producers.

• How to interest broadcasters in radio development programming.

• How to encourage the active participation of broadcasters.
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Proposal Components

The groundwork for demonstrating the feasibility of more modern mass communications to Africa is already in place at the new UN Conference Centre at Addis Ababa. Radio and TV programming, for example, use the same technology as the audio and video production already at the centre. To take on the wider range of broadcast programming, these facilities need only to be upgraded.

In addition, introducing some new digital and computer technologies will allow amazing synergy and cost-efficiency with the traditional media (e.g., video and audio cassettes, photographs, and text). Today, being technically capable in one medium means becoming nearly so in others.

Satellite communications, frequently prohibitive in price, can be made affordable by using space already leased by the UN on a satellite. By using satellite transmissions and phone lines for communication back to the broadcast hub in Addis Ababa, African radio broadcasters can be inexpensively equipped to receive, synthesize, produce, and transmit development information. Other media, such as newspapers, can receive text and photos via personal computers, and the Internet can carry information produced by Africans around the globe.

Pilot Radio Project

Because radio programming will not require ECA to buy a lot of additional hardware, a trial network for radio programming production and dissemination can begin once technology and production expertise, available locally in Addis Ababa, is secured. ECA and its partners, therefore, will initiate a limited-scale pilot program, the Pan-African Radio System (PARS), based on communication methods now in use, and fine-tuning the system as experience dictates. About fifty African radio broadcasters will be involved, using programming initially developed by ECA and its partners. Among issues to be tested during the pilot phase are the availability and willingness of producers to be involved in promoting development information and the willingness of producers and owners to air development programmes.

The Greater Horn of Africa will be the testing ground. The area, as geographically defined, includes Addis Ababa where the UN Conference Centre is based, and is home to three UN official languages. In addition, the area's development concerns, diversity of cultures, and different levels of economic strength mirror much of the conditions in the rest of Africa. The pilot project will run for at least six months; its actual duration will depend largely on acceptance by the broadcasting community and the willingness of all concerned parties to encourage its growth. Results can serve as a model for expanding radio broadcasting to the rest of Africa, matching projects with suitable producers, and setting fair rates.

Examples of programming under consideration include a series on capacity-building, civil rights, and starting a small business. Influential Africans visiting the UN Conference Centre will be approached for interviews, round table meetings, and face-to-face encounters with development experts.

Production

Although modern technologies allow for the radical rethinking of how a message is produced and broadcast, they have little effect on the intrinsic quality of the message. Partners to this proposal, therefore, will be asked to cultivate a list of radio and TV producers with interest or experience in development issues. The producers would work closely with experts who know how development programming can deliver a coherent and consistent message.

In addition, a Pan-African Radio System Fund for Producer Training would help ensure that qualified, competent media professionals remain a prominent part of the African media landscape. Prestigious international broadcasters have expressed great interest in helping establish this competence, and the fund hopes to provide top-quality training for at least the fifty Africans on the PARS project during the proposal period. The partners will help make non-dogmatic, non-ideological, well-informed, and professionally produced development programming part of the African mass-media scene.

Expected Results

Basic systems of administration, production, and dissemination of development programming in Africa will be created.

The groundwork for a true pan-African radio system will be established.

Africa's private and public sectors will be able to gauge the interest of the continent in development programming and the effect of development information on the public at large.

ECA and its partners will be a respected presence in radio and video production, and a major contributor of development information to other media ranging from print to Internet.

Partners' Contribution

ECA invites partnership on this proposal from both public and private sources. There are training, technology, and potential commercial aspects of the proposal where experience and connections could be shared, participation on a steering committee would be valuable, and practical knowledge of short-cuts, techniques in market development, and other professional strategies could be useful.

Beyond establishing whether a market exists and how to develop that market, investment in this proposal should benefit both development and peace-building interests. Moreover, for ECA, it opens an exciting possibility of outreach to the media community and to Africans well beyond the traditional narrow channels.

Annex A

Consultative Planning Meeting, 22-23 January 1996 , Addis Ababa

Annex B

Profiles: ECA's Senior Management Team

Joining the Executive Secretary and Deputy Executive Secretary on the Senior Management Team will be the division chiefs. Their profiles follow *.

Chief, Food Security and Sustainable Development Division

Ms Paulina Makinwa-Adebusoye is a national of Nigeria and most recently served as the Chief Technical Advisor to the Nigerian Ministry of Health and was responsible for the coordination and monitoring of all national and international population programmes in Nigeria. Since 1989, she has been Director of the Social Development Department of the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research (NISER) where she directed policy research and executed programmes on Population and Development, Women's Health, and related social concerns. In 1994, Dr Makinwa-Adebusoye was invited as Visiting Researcher and Guest Lecturer in the Department of Rural Sociology at Cornell University. From 1975 to 1989, she was a Professor of Geography at the University of Bénin and Director of the Centre for Social Cultural and Environmental Research. For many years, she has regularly undertaken consultancies and served as an expert resource for UN organizations, the World Bank, governments and foundations on family planning, nexus areas, gender issues, migration and urbanization, rural women's work, health, and demographics. Some of her published work on the nexus issues include: Nexus Between Population Growth, Agricultural Stagnation and Environmental Degradation; Relationships Between Population Dynamics and Agricultural/Rural Development; Rapid Urban Growth Versus Declining Agricultural Productivity; Population Growth and Food Production in Nigeria; and Integrated Rural Development in Nigeria and Women's Roles.

Dr Makinwa-Adebusoye has been a member and officer of many professional and service organizations, including President of the Social Science Council of Nigeria. She speaks English and French. She has also been the recipient of numerous scholastic awards and honours, including a Rockefeller Fellowship as Resident Scholar at the Bellagio (Italy) Study and Conference Centre. She has a doctorate and a master's degree in Population Science from Harvard University and a master's degree in Economics from New York University.

Chief, Economic and Social Policy Division

Mr Ali Abdel Gadir Ali is a national of Sudan and for the last two years has been Director of the Research Department at the Inter Arab Investment Guarantee Corporation (IAIGC) where he supervised the planning and implementation of research activities. During this period, he advised management on economic trends and events, liaised with and represented the IAIGC to the business community, assessed investment opportunities, improved databases, and instituted and trained staff on advanced information systems. Mr Ali is also currently the director of a major research project on poverty being conducted by the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) in Nairobi, Kenya. As an independent consultant from 1992 to 1995, he focused on the effects of structural adjustment on sub-Saharan Africa, particularly on poverty in the rural sector. From 1982 to 1992, he was a Professor of Economics at the University of Gezira, Sudan, researching, teaching, and consulting on the theories and applications of development economics. From 1982 to 1988, Mr Ali was a Senior Economist for the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa doing research on African economies, writing country reports, formulating policies for project financing, and appraising projects.

Mr Ali has written widely on development economics and most recently on 'The Challenge of Poverty Reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa', advised major government organs, worked on technical committees for governments and development organizations, served as a university External Examiner, and worked for ten years as a member of the Child Survival Working Group of the Population Council. Mr Ali holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Economics from the University of Essex in England. He speaks fluent Arabic and English.

Chief, African Centre for Women

Ms Josephine Ouedraogo is a national of Burkina Faso and most recently was the Director General for International Cooperation for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Burkina Faso where she had responsibilities for negotiating priorities and agreements, and planning and providing oversight of the implementation of national programmes conducted in collaboration with multilateral and bilateral organizations and African partner states. From 1993 to 1995, she was Director of A.R.C., a firm conducting research and training in the areas of rural development strategies, management of environmental resources, empowerment of rural organizations, and national decentralization planning. Prior to that she was in charge of research and training at the Switzerland-based SACED Exchanges Formation where she worked on development programme management, population, and conservation of natural resources. From 1989 to 1992, she was Coordinator of the Sub-Saharan Project on Women and Health for the Pan African Development Institute where she designed the socio-cultural and socio-economic information and training programme for women's health, and launched a women's magazine. From 1984 to 1987, she was the Minister of Family Development and National Solidarity where she helped to formulate the first Family Code in Burkina Faso; designed policies and coordinated programming for national family planning; initiated rehabilitation efforts for marginalized groups including street children, the disabled, and beggars; coordinated emergency relief efforts for the Sahel region; and created the People's Day Care Centres.

Ms Ouedraogo has engaged in research throughout her career and has written widely on sociological impacts, particularly on women, of development in agriculture, education, and infrastructure. She holds a Licence degree in Sociology from the UniversitÉ RenÉ Descartes in France. Ms Ouedraogo speaks French and English.

Chief, Economic Cooperation and Integration Division

Mr Mbaye Diouf is a national of Sénégal and has been a member of the ECA staff for fifteen years where he has held several key positions, very recently having completed four years as the head of the Economic Cooperation and Trade and Development Finance Divisions, where he was responsible for formulating policies and implementing programmes in regional integration, debt management, resource mobilization, financial and monetary policy, regional and external trade, South-South initiatives, and implementation of the objectives of the Abuja Treaty. During this period, he was a major contributor to ECA's establishment of institutions for regional integration including the ECOWAS Bank, the African Monetary Fund, and the AFREXIM Bank. Mr Diouf also has had major supervisory and administrative responsibilities for more than ten years, including positions as Special Assistant to the Executive Secretary, Chief of ECA's Trade Centre, and Head of the Commission's subregional centre in Yaounde. In addition, he has in the last year undertaken a temporary assignment as head of Conference and General Services where he has restructured the division's work programme, staff assignments, and procurement policies. For the whole of the UN complex, Mr Diouf has undertaken management and system reforms for security, telecommunications, and building management. Most important during this period, he developed policies and supervised the administration of the new UN Conference Centre, which became operational in 1996.

Prior to ECA, he worked extensively in both the private and public sectors including the French Bank for External Trade in Marseille. Subsequently, he was the Assistant to the Director of Operations of a trading company in Dakar and Deputy General Manager of SAPEM Industries in Dakar.

Mr Diouf has an advanced degree in International Trade Economics and Management from the Marseille School of Economics and Business Administration (ESCAEM-CECE). He also holds undergraduate degrees in Economics/Management and Foreign Languages from the Universities of Dakar-Aix Marseille and the Aix en Provence Institute of Technology. He speaks French, English, and Spanish.

Chief, Development Information Services Division

Ms Karima Bounemra Ben Soltane is a Tunisian national and for the last year and a half has been the Director General of IRSIT, the Tunisian research and development centre on information technology, where she had executive responsibilities for telecommunications policy, planning, technical implementation, research, and employee management. From 1992 to 1995, she was Director of IRSIT's Department of Telecommunications and Networks responsible for multimedia, network management, and standardization. She was also selected as a member of the high- level Working Group that was established at the request of the ECA Conference of Ministers to prepare the Africa Information Society Initiative. This initiative set out the blueprint for Africa's entry to the global information highway and the use of information technology for development, and forms the basis for ECA's work programme in information technology. Ms Bounemra has also participated in initiatives to develop bilingual videotext, a national research and technology network, and a news programme, and supervised various telecommunications projects. From 1990 to 1993, she was President of CT 73, the Tunisian technical committee for standardization on information technology issues. From 1987 to 1989, she was President of AFNOR, an expert group in France working on telecommunications standardization, and represented the organization to international bodies.

Ms. Bounemra speaks French, Arabic, and English. She is a published author and member of numerous professional organizations on telematics and information technology. She earned a Ph.D. in Information Systems (cum laude) from the UPMC Doctorate (Paris VI) and a Design Engineering degree from the University of Tunis.

Chief, Programme Planning, Finance, and Evaluation Division

Mr Samba Jack is a national of The Gambia and is currently ECA's Chief of the Programme Planning, Finance, and Evaluation Division. In this capacity since 1996, he serves as principal adviser to the Executive Secretary and progamme managers on policy and strategic options and on all facets of programmes, finances, budgets, and programme evaluation. His association with the Commission spans more than two decades. During this period, he has worked as a development economist in progressively responsible positions in various substantive units of the secretariat, beginning with the former Social Development Division, through the then-Research and Statistics Division, the Economic Research Unit, and the Socio-economic Research and Planning Division. From 1991 to 1992, he served as Secretary to the Commission and Special Assistant to the Executive Secretary and was Chief of the Policy and Programme Coordination Office from 1992 to 1996.

During his tenure, Mr Jack has been involved in most of the major policy, strategy, and programme initiatives of the Commission and has written on a wide range of African development issues and policies through substantive papers prepared for the Commission's various intergovernmental organs, technical expert bodies, and numerous regional and international seminars, workshops, and conferences. He has undertaken technical assistance advisory missions to the Member States of the Commission on development planning and on policy, programme, and project formulation. He regularly represents the Commission on behalf of the Executive Secretary to other UN agencies and to international organizations.

Mr Jack has an M.A. degree in Economic Geography from the University of Cambridge (UK) and an M.A. in Development Economics from the University of Pittsburgh. He speaks English and French.

Chief, Development Management Division

Mr James Nxumalo is a national of Swaziland and from 1992-1997 was the Governor and Chairman of the Board of the Central Bank of Swaziland where his responsibilities included advising the Minister of Finance, managing more than sixty professionals, providing linkages between public and private sectors, and acting as a finance representative to bodies such as SADC. As Governor of the Central Bank, he instituted policies to reflect changed development imperatives and promoted organizational efficiencies through management reform, including departmental restructuring, contracting of selected services, and institution of a program of upgrading supervisory and staff skills. From 1979-1992, he was Advisor to the Executive Director of the Africa Region for the World Bank, where he undertook analyses of a broad range of development issues and proposed policy and management solutions. His responsibilities included policy analysis of development issues, preparation of position papers, and liaising between African countries and the Executive Director. During this period, he also developed new internal management and governance systems for the World Bank in order to provide better service to developing-country clients, particularly those in Africa. From 1968-1979, Mr Nxumalo served in the Government of Swaziland in the Ministries of Finance and Economic Planning, including eight years as a Permanent Secretary. During the course of this work, he served as head of administration, advised the Minister, and developed Ministry policies and positions.

Mr Nxumalo earned an M.A. in Public Administration from Harvard University and an M.A. in Economics from the University of Colorado. As a special activity, he has recently helped to establish a regional training institute in southern Africa for resource and debt management.

Chief, Human Resources System Management Division

Mr Kurt Jonsson is a national of Sweden and since 1993 has been the Senior Human Resources Officer for the World Bank's Africa Region (division) focusing on organizational effectiveness and management. In the last two years, a period of restructuring at the Bank, he was responsible for the human resources aspects of the change and renewal programme for the Africa Region. Changes were implemented so the Bank could better serve its clients and put emphasis on more effective results from the field operations in Africa. This work included the introduction of a new organizational structure designed to sharpen country focus and to more effectively utilize staff resources. The renewal programme was developed through a participatory process and resulted in a different work culture, a team-based structure, streamlined business processes, and a demand-driven work programme. HR interventions also included more effective performance management systems, business-driven learning and staff skills development, revitalization of management, and integration of support staff into the substance of the work programme. To further support effectiveness, the region is advancing its use of technology by employing innovative systems for managing knowledge, expanding integrated databases, and complementing electronic communication with video conferencing and satellite connections.

For the thirteen years prior to joining the Bank, Mr. Jonsson co-founded and was Managing Director of the Adizes Institute Europe and Cicero Management of London and Stockholm. These management consulting firms offered services to the private and public sectors in human resources management, personnel administration, training and staff development, management and organizational effectiveness, information technology, business development, and internationalization. Mr. Jonsson speaks English and French. He studied Pedagogical and Education Technology at the University of Stockholm.

[FOOTNOTE--page 9]

* Several UN and bilateral agencies and NGOs are partners in these two initiatives, including ITU, UNESCO, IDRC, FAO, World Bank, UNDP, and Bellanet.

[FOOTNOTE--page 10]

*Special dimensions will be added to ECA's work through two proposals, Networking to Provide Economic and Social Policy Advice in Africa and Advancing South-South Cooperation, which will assemble resources that bring substance and innovation to the other programmes.

[FOOTNOTE--page 23]

*Candidates for these positions will be sought through networking relationships being established by ECA.

[FOOTNOTE--page 60]

*Sponsors of the conference were the African Business Round Table, Global Coalition for Africa, Republic of Ghana, Government of Japan, Overseas Development Administration-UK, Swedish International Development Agency, UNDP, and World Bank Group.

[FOOTNOTE--page 63]

*Representatives from cooperating institutions were the following: Mr G.A. Akamiokhor, Securities and Exchange Commission, Nigeria; Ms Odette Gema Diloya, Funds de Promotion de L'industrie; Mr Mumba S. Kapumpa, Securities and Exchange Commission, Zambia; Mr Joe K. Kihumba, Nairobi Stock Exchange; Mr Elsadiq Mahmoud Musa, ADB-African Development Fund; Mr Martin M. Makgatlhe, Stockbrokers Botswana Ltd.; Dr Sam Mensah, University of Michigan-Flint; Dr Andely Rigobert Roger, Banque des Etats De L'afrique Centrale; Mr Diery Seck, IDRC; Professor Lemma W. Senbet, University of Maryland; and Dr Victor Shingiro, UNESCO.

[FOOTNOTE--page 101]

*Tokyo International Conference on African Development, October 1993.

[FOOTNOTE--page 127]

*The chief of the Conference and General Services Division has yet to be determined.