A daunting task, but ECA and partners poised to re-energize APRM

Addis Ababa, 29 January 2008 (ECA) – Close to five years after the establishment of the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), there is a growing feeling among the lead actors, including the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) and some participating countries that “the mechanism may atrophy if it is not injected with the resources to implement the Plan of Actions (PoA) emanating from the process”.

The sentiment was echoed widely among participants attending an in house seminar, organized by ECA's Governance and Public Administration Division (GPAD) to review current progress and explore ways to leverage additional resources to the APRM process through inter-divisional collaboration.

ECA's Executive Secretary, Mr. Abdoulie Janneh noted that APRM is innovative, it gives a voice to the people and is therefore the clearest manifestation by this continent about the seriousness of governance.

He however noted that the nature of ECA's current technical support and participation in the APRM review missions is in need of careful review in light of a growing need to move fast towards implementing the Plan of Action that results from the APRM process. He said that any meaningful engagement with the process requires its institutionalization in ECA's other divisions. Mr. Janneh said that this, in addition to improving governance at the national level with collaboration from UNDP and the ADB, would “not only help to bring additional expertise on board, but move towards faster implementation of the plan of action at the national level”.

Key to the discussions was the need to counteract what Mr. Okey Onyejekwe, Director of GPAD referred to as “growing afro-pessimism, brought about by the failure of governance in many African countries”. Offering Kenya as a recent example, he noted that the country's self-assessment, which was completed in 2006, should have served as a clear early warning indicator of an impending crisis. The assessment predicted the current post-elections quagmire with cunning accuracy and elaborated on the grievances that include growing inequalities, corruption and allocation of land and resources and a context of ethnic tensions.

Participants shared their experiences, noting that despite the many achievements made through ECA's support, the mainly State-led process has tremendous political implications and challenges. These range from the complexity of the process, tendency by governments to influence the process, lack of uniformity in selection of research institutions that lead the process on the ground and the absence of meaningful civil society participation. “We have the challenge of mitigating the perception that the process is not credible if it continues to remain disconnected from emerging realities,” said Said Adejumobi, former technical adviser in Nigeria's APRM Secretariat.

In addition, the slow and belabored nature of the process compounds existing challenges. “Considering that 50% have signed up for peer review, and only 5 countries have completed the process at an average completion time of 33-35 months, something needs to change,” said Mr. Kojo Busia, who heads GPAD's APRM support unit. He proposed a number of possibilities, for instance, simplifying the complex questionnaire.

To increase traction and begin implementing the Plan of Action phase of the process, ECA needs to tap into its comparative advantage of addressing poverty alleviation and socio-economic development. The issues cut across the questions in the APRM self-assessment questionnaire and therefore, involving other, non-APRM Unit staff members working on MDGs, for example, could help to bring synergies into the APRM Action Plans.

It was also agreed that managing expectations, better in house preparations and knowledge sharing among staff are required. Building on the success of the African Governance Report and given its mandate to speak out as a technical wing of the APRM secretariat, ECA should concentrate on dovetailing APRM with the AGR tools and seek to re-energize the APRM process in a focused and systematic way.

Furthermore, it was stressed that, as the mechanism's history is a short one, results cannot be expected overnight.

Background:

APRM's ultimate goal is to help improve and foster good governance within African countries by promoting political stability, economic growth, sustainable development and integration through sharing of best practices. Above all, the APRM presents an unprecedented opportunity to African countries to experiment with a new approach to governance whereby policy-reform is essentially driven by domestic constituents rather than externally driven accountability to development partners. The self-assessment questionnaires are grouped under four broad thematic themes: democracy and political governance, economic governance and management, corporate governance and socio-economic development.

ECA offers technical support to the APRM secretariat. It participates in wide consultations and interviews with relevant stakeholders—government officials, parliamentarians, opposition party members, private sector representatives, civil society groups, including the media, academia, trade unions, and non-governmental organizations to prepare the country for the review.

In addition to direct support to countries preparing to start the mechanism, ECA provides technical assessment in economic governance and management, democracy and political governance, and socioeconomic development. ECA contributed in the preparation and review of documents including Background Documents, Self-Assessment Reports, and Country Plan of Action.

For more on ECA's APRM support unit, http://www.uneca.org/aprm/index.asp