Opening Statements:

• His Excellency Thabo Mbeki, President of the Republic of South Africa
• Mr. K.Y. Amoako, Executive Secretary, ECA
• Mr. Amara Essy, Interim Chairperson, Commission of the African Union

Statement by Outgoing Chairperson of the Conference

Election of Officers:

The conference will elect a new Chairperson and the Bureau. The outgoing chairperson will welcome the new chairperson.

Opening Statement by the new Chairperson of the Conference

Closing of the Opening Session

General Debate

The core principles of NEPAD offer a significant opportunity to scale up the response to Africa's development challenge, but also imply a new way of doing business. In implementing the core principles of NEPAD, African governments also recognize that while development partners have an important role to play, it is the African governments themselves that are primarily responsible for the actions and policy measures that are required to realize the objectives of the NEPAD programme. This is mainly because these actions and policy measures will, for the most part, be implemented primarily at the country level. These actions will require a greater focus on outcomes, such as meeting the MDGs; improving political, economic and corporate governance; integrating budget decisions and planning into medium-term expenditure frameworks; the building of national capacities for policy formulation and implementation; the deepening of domestic resource mobilization; and the accelerating of regional integration to penetrate global markets and attract foreign direct investment. The Conference will examine these issues particularly as they relate to the challenge to African countries of tapping the potentials under existing modalities, such as the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, to open up the space for greater national ownership of policies and programmes; the need for gradual build-up of national capacities to ensure the attainment of such outcomes.

General Debate

One of the significant features of NEPAD is the focus it places on transforming Africa's aid relations with its development partners. Drawing on the lessons learned to date on the determinants of aid effectiveness, this focus requires increased political will from Africa's partners to improve the governance of aid, including the alignment of its allocation with poverty reduction objectives under the guidelines of the Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD/DAC). Second, it will also entail a more concerted focus on improving the quality of aid and reducing the transaction costs through greater harmonization of aid policies, simplification of aid practices, and where conditions allow, the channeling of aid through national budgets of recipient countries. Third, it will require measures to implement the decisions taken at Monterrey that favour Africa as these relate to comprehensive approaches to financing development in the continent through higher and better quality of aid, assured sustainability of debt relief, and greater market access.

General Debate

For both Africans and external partners, the application of the core principles of NEPAD and their outcomes on development performance necessitates periodic and systematic assessment that will enable the tracking of progress of these outcomes, identification and reinforcement of best practices, assessment of capacity gaps, and implementation of the required corrective actions. Indeed, the institutional building blocks for such systematic tracking already exist. On the part of African countries the focus on self-monitoring and peer review is consistent with this. The African Peer Review (APR) mechanism, designed to ensure that the policies and practices of participating States conform to the political, economic and corporate governance codes and standards adopted by African leaders, is key in this regard. The agenda will allow for discussion of the relevant institutional building blocks as well as the specific benchmarks on the African and donor sides that deserve attention for monitoring progress under NEPAD. It will consider the need to ensure greater alignment of donor aid policies with African ownership and the need to shift the focus of donor practices towards recipient country needs for strategic medium-term planning and coordination of the Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) resources. The agenda will also explore how a credible peer review mechanism will reconcile the principles of African ownership with the obligations to track progress under a partnership based on mutually agreed outcomes.

General Debate

Closure of the Meeting