The aggregate scorecard on progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) shows that Africa will not meet all the targets by the target date of 2015. This has unleashed a flurry of efforts to scale up interventions to accelerate progress. But progress depends in the main on the effective contribution of various stakeholders, including national and subnational governments. However, attention has remained focused on government at the national level in spite of the self-evident fact that many African countries have, with the objective of improving public service delivery along with advancing national unity in the context of multi-ethnicity, devolved significant policy, spending, revenue and administrative responsibilities to lower tiers of government. In some countries, sub-national governments account for more than 50% of aggregate public sector expenditure.

However, not much is known in the African context of the role/contribution of subnational jurisdictions in the development effort in general and in efforts to achieve the MDGs in particular. In view of the urgency of scaling up action to accelerate progress towards the MDGs and given the potential and challenges associated with the increased role of subnational jurisdictions in this regard, this gap in knowledge has to be bridged. Two issues are worth exploring in this regard. The first relates to what subnational governments have done to advance the MDG agenda and the second concerns with what subnational governments can and should do, within the limit of their functional assignments, to contribute to the acceleration of the rate of progress towards the targets of the MDGs.

To address this gap and provide policy options for consideration by African policy makers on leveraging sub-national governments to accelerate efforts to achieve the MDGs, the Office of the Senior Special Assistant to the President of Nigeria on MDGs (OSSAP/MDGs) and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UN-ECA) are co-organizing a Conference on the role of subnational jurisdictions in efforts to achieve the MDGs in Abuja, Nigeria, from 7 May to 9 May 2009.

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