Meeting of the Committee of Experts Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Opening Remarks by 26 March 2008 Your Excellency, Mr. Mekonnen Manyazewal, State Minister of Finance and I am pleased to welcome you to this meeting and to Addis Ababa, the home of the African Union Commission and the Economic Commission for Africa. Your presence here is a strong demonstration of support for the actualization of the plan to begin Joint Annual Meetings of the AU Conference of African Ministers of Finance (CAMEF) and the ECA Conference of African Ministers of Finance, Planning and Economic Development. To start with, I wish to thank the outgoing Chairpersons and members of the two Bureaus for the good work that they have done in steering the work of their respective Committee of Experts. We also appreciate the generosity and unstinting hospitality extended by Cameroon as host of the last CAMEF and by Ethiopia which hosted the last ECA Conference of Ministers and is hosting this first joint meeting. This gathering is important for several reasons. Having it as a joint meeting brings together under the same umbrella, the same group of experts responsible for finance and economic development in our member States. This arrangement, which was agreed upon by respective AU and ECA Ministerial Meetings, was also endorsed by the African Union Summit. It will bring about greater synergies and coherence in tackling key economic and social issues in Africa and also enable closer collaboration and coordination between the African Union Commission and the Economic Commission for Africa. I sincerely hope that this will be an enduring arrangement. The ECA Conference of Ministers also provides an opportunity for you to examine how well your institution has been performing in the discharge of its mandate. In this regard, we continue to consolidate implementation of the ECA Business Plan in accordance with our pillars of regional integration and helping Africa to meet its special needs. This joint meeting is but one example of our realignment to support African Union priorities and to help achieve the noble objectives of its NEPAD programme. The importance of this meeting also derives from its purpose, which is to address major economic and social issues in African development. You are however also meeting at a historical moment in the sense that this year marks ECA's 50th Anniversary. We will be kicking-off year long celebrations at the Ministerial Meeting in a few days time and we are counting on your usual support to ensure the success of the various other activities being lined up in this regard. Last year, you deliberated on accelerating growth and development to meet the MDGs. This remains a very important objective to which we must give unwavering attention. However, achieving the MDGs means that we must continue to scan the landscape both for ideas and challenges pertinent to meeting these goals. Indeed, as we look back on fifty years of development policy in Africa, we must inevitably address new and emerging challenges. For instance, Africa has to assess whether recent growth is creating much needed employment while also confronting challenges of a global nature like HIV/AIDS which is depleting Africa's skills base and climate change which affects livelihoods including food supplies. Rising food and oil prices in turn pose balance of payments problems for many African countries and threaten the livelihoods of millions of poor people. These considerations informed our theme for this meeting - Meeting Africa's New Challenges in the 21st Century. It is now common knowledge that Africa has been growing steadily over the past five years and that as a whole the continent is also governing itself better. Growth performance in 2007 was 5.8% which is marginally better than the 5.7% achieved the previous year. Moreover, twenty-five countries achieved a growth rate of over 5% or more in 2007 while another fourteen grew at over 3%. This encouraging trend has been matched by improved governance and greater commitment to democracy and peacebuilding. However, if Africa is to achieve the MDGs by the target date of 2015, current growth rates need to increase to over 7% yet this achievement is being threatened by the possibility of worldwide recession. If the strong growth in other developing countries is affected by troubling economic conditions in developed countries, this may adversely affect African economies because a good part of their recent growth has come from commodity exports to emerging economies. Moreover, growth in Africa has not generated the quantity and quality of jobs that will help to significantly reduce poverty. This is partly because the growth derives from capital-intensive extractive sectors and also because there is very little value-added to export products. Improvements in governance are essential to ensure peace and security, sustain growth and implement of policies in favour of the vulnerable groups. African countries are committed to the promotion of good governance and many have voluntarily acceded to the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), which is essentially a mechanism to ensure that participating countries promote and observe NEPAD's principles and objectives. However, the building of capable states is also central to good governance. Working in tandem with the private sector and civil society organizations, a capable state must deliver effective, efficient and equitable services to the citizenry to overcome the effects of persistent poverty, insecurity, corruption, brain drain and violent conflict. To do so, we must gain a better understanding of how the state can promote the rule of law, strike the right balance between public and private provision of goods and services, manage diversity better, and mobilize the human and natural resources of society behind common development goals and aspirations. The persistence of poverty in Africa in the face of the recent growth also requires innovative thinking. In most of our countries, efforts to address poverty have concentrated in the main on the economic and social spheres, yet there is strong evidence to show that enabling the poor to use the law to protect and advance their rights as citizens and economic actors is an important element in the fight against poverty. You will therefore be hearing from representatives of the Commission on the Legal Empowerment of the Poor in order to better appreciate the issues involved and the potential development benefits that can derive from extending various legal protections, norms and instruments to the overwhelming majority of the poor in Africa. Efforts to bring about job generating growth, improve governance and create wealth in Africa are now increasingly hampered by other challenges. Although a long-term challenge, climate change is having immediate effects and since Africa is one of the regions most vulnerable to its effects we must act to mitigate its impact, adapt to its effects and obtain the technology and finance required for an effective response. It is Africa's poor - those who live on desert fringes, in small fishing villages, next to drying up lakes and rivers - that will feel the most severe effects of climate change. Indeed, climate change can constrain overall progress in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). ECA is accordingly picking up the mantle. We backstopped the participation of African countries at the recent UN Conference on Climate Change in Bali, Indonesia, and as you know, we are also mounting a major climate change initiative called Clim-Dev Africa in close collaboration with the African Union and the African Development Bank. In this context, I wish to formally inform you that we will be establishing the policy arm of Clim-Dev Africa, the African Climate Policy Centre here in Addis Ababa in collaboration with The Energy Resources Institute (TERI) of India. TERI is headed by Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which recently won the Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts in this area. We shall be signing the Memorandum of Understanding between ECA and TERI during the Ministerial Meeting. Rising food and oil prices also have adverse effects for African economies. The rising price of staples which has been blamed for social disturbances in several African countries could also erode success in achieving MDG hunger targets. Although we can identify demand factors such as the increase in food consumption in growing economies and supply factors like the shift in land use from food crops into biofuels, we need innovative thinking to address this problem which affects urban and rural populations alike but in different ways. Oil prices, which recently reached $110 per barrel, also have short-term implications for producers and consumers. The challenge before us is how to strike the right balance between current food and energy needs and potential future benefits from increased production of these goods. This meeting will also be deliberating on statistics, trade, finance, and science and technology. Statistics and data are key to tracking the progress being made in economic, social and human development but the generation of credible and reliable statistics is dependent on the development of our collective capacity to generate the data required for decision-making and evidence-based planning. This meeting has been in the forefront of restoring ECA mandate in the area of statistics and I am pleased to report that we have made great strides following the establishment of the African Centre for Statistics as a full sub-programme of this Commission. The ACS has been active in several areas including technical cooperation and capacity building as well as the coordination and harmonization of statistical development activities working closely with the African Union, African Development Bank and the Friends of ECA. In the area of trade, our challenge is to build up productive capacities, provide infrastructure to facilitate trade and ensure that trade rules are pro-development. These are core objectives of the Aid-for-Trade initiative on which ECA is worked closely with other partners. Aid for trade should provide additional resources to fill the gap between domestic resources and needs and should not be used as a mechanism for switching support from other sectors. Apart from the on-going WTO Doha Round negotiations which have slowed down considerably, several African countries are also engaged in negotiating Economic Partnership Agreements with the European Union. Given the constraints of uncompleted negotiations and a looming deadline, the solution found in several cases was to sign interim agreements. However, the interim agreements are just that and do not address a lot of outstanding issues. In taking this process forward, it must be borne in mind that Africa's overall objective is closer regional integration and any eventual outcome should promote this objective. Accessing adequate finance through aid, investment, loans, remittances and other instruments remain important for Africa. In this regard, we must continue to address key issues like the quantity of aid flows, effectiveness of aid, mutual accountability of commitments, the nature of investments, the impact of external debt overhang and striking a balance between the drawbacks of brain drain and benefits of remittances. This year's Economic Report on Africa to be launched during the Ministerial segment addresses the issue of financing for development in more detail. This meeting will also provide an opportunity for you to undertake a regional review of financing for development prior to the global review of the Monterrey Consensus scheduled to take place in Doha later on this year. You are, of course, aware that the third African Ministerial Conference on Financing for Development taking place in Kigali later on this year will focus on climate change. Science and technology also has a key role to play in transforming African economies. African Heads of State and Government underscored the importance of science and technology by making it the theme of their January 2007 Summit. We followed up with this initiative along with the AU and UNESCO by organizing a Science with Africa Conference. This Conference aimed at operationalizing existing initiatives and exploring how to better integrate African scientists into global science initiatives and projects. It was also about bring scientists into direct contact with policymakers and legislators in order to launch a constructive dialogue between these two groups. The "Annual Report on the Work of the Commission" which will be presented later on, contains details on the implementation of our programme of work, the strengthening of our institutional processes and the formation of platforms to improve our service delivery. Following the resolution adopted by Ministers last year, the seven subsidiary organs of the Commission have been established and several of them have already held their inaugural meetings. The progress that we are making is also evident in ECA's Sub-regional offices which have used additional resources provided to them by UN General Assembly on an exceptional basis to scale-up programme performance and deepen their operational activities in partnership with their respective Regional Economic Communities. In this regard, they have articulated multi-year programmes of work and draw up Memorandums of Understanding with the RECS. Your Commission is committed to keeping ECA at the cutting edge and as repository of knowledge on development thinking in Africa. Through our knowledge management initiative, we have established a portal to capture, organize, find and share knowledge amongst our staff, clients and partners in an effective and manageable manner. Our knowledge management platform is an online resource centre that provides news, events and publications across several communities of practice, whose members are also able to engage in discussion, debate and exchange of information. The KM platform will become increasing integrated as on-going upgrades of our existing IT networks have linked SROs to ECA headquarters which in turn will be integrated into a common network with the AU and RECs. In keeping with the spirit of our renewed and close partnership, ECA has worked closely with the AU Commission to organize this meeting while the African Development Bank continues to be our close partner in several areas. All three institutions are actively engaged in regular consultations and joint programming and delivery in several areas such as tracking and monitoring of economic conditions in the continent, environment, gender, peace and security, regional integration, trade, science and technology, statistics, and MDG related matters. ECA also continues to provide key support to the NEPAD Secretariat and to the APRM process. To date, we have provided technical backstopping to 22 APRM Missions. I am also pleased to inform you that ECA's efforts are being supported by the United Nations system under the leadership of the Secretary-General who has established the African MDG Steering and Working Groups. The Secretary-General will also be convening a High Level Event on 22 September 2008 to focus attention on the achievement of the MDGs in Africa. ECA is also working closely with other UN agencies to enhance coordination of UN activities in Africa through a strengthened Regional Consultation Mechanism (RCM) in support of the African Union and its NEPAD programme. The Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations chaired the 8th Meeting of the RCM here in Addis Ababa in November 2007. ECA has continued to scale-up efforts to strengthen partnerships with bilateral partners in support of Africa's development. We very much value the support of ECA's bilateral partners and received a significant boost with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding with our Pooled Fund Partners in late 2007. It is hoped at some stage that this will become an umbrella grouping to which all our bilateral partners can belong. The final report of the external review of the African Institute for Economic Development and Planning (IDEP) along with recommendations from its Governing Council will be submitted for your consideration as will the proposed ECA Strategic Framework for 2010-2011. Your contribution on these items will be greatly valued. In conclusion, I wish to emphasize that while Africa is making steady progress, it needs bold, determined and focused leadership to meet its emerging and future challenges. As its key technical experts, you all have a major role to play in this regard by helping to identify imaginative ideas and workable solutions to address these challenges. Indeed, our common objective must be to harness regional resources to make this 21st century, the African century. I wish you successful deliberations. Thank you for your kind attention.
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