| The Twentieth Meeting of the Technical Preparatory Committee of
the Whole (TEPCOW) and the Ninth Meeting of the Intergovernmental Group of Experts
Opening Statement by K. Y. Amoako Mr. Chairman, It is my pleasure to welcome you all to Algiers for this meeting of the experts from Finance and Planning Ministries of our Member States. I would like to thank the Honourable Secretary-General for his excellent opening remarks. On behalf of all the participants, I wish to express my deepest appreciation to the Government and people of the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria for offering to host this important meeting, and for their hospitality since our arrival in Algiers. Algeria’s history of solidarity, leadership and commitment to Pan-African solutions is a continuing inspiration for meetings such as this. I look forward to this meeting, not only because of the prospect of working with respected colleagues, but, because of the substance which we shall discuss. We have been building towards this meeting for some time now. Within the last three years, these conferences of Ministers of Finance and Planning, held jointly or in separate groups, have covered the key topics of trade and investment, financial sector reforms, debt management, and the challenge of financing development in Africa. We not only gained consensus on these key topics, but our positions helped influence G-8 meetings and the policies of debt holders. The November 2000 Conference of Ministers of Finance, helped to prepare African countries for two upcoming global gatherings mandated by the UN General Assembly: The UN high-level event on financing for development and the third United Nations Conference on the Least Developed Countries. But Ministers of Finance went beyond the November 2000 agenda, in reaction to a set of ideas I suggested at that Conference, most of which had drawn upon the above mentioned cycle of ministerial conferences and on less formal discussions held with Ministers and donors. I suggested last November that it was time for a new compact with our donors and I suggested a number of concepts for the compact. The Ministers of Finance reacted quite positively to that suggestion and mandated that at this Conference we amplify the discussion by tabling a concrete set of proposals. Since the November Conference, we have worked hard on this. As the process of articulating the Compact and the related consultations evolved, it emerged that Presidents Bouteflika of Algeria, Mbeki of South Africa and Obasanjo of Nigeria were developing an initiative, the Millennium Partnership for the African Recovery Programme, known by an abbreviated acronym as MAP. At about the same time, President Wade of Senegal announced his OMEGA Plan for Africa. Both the OMEGA Plan and the MAP share the same objectives and vision, in so far as they are inspired by the need to launch Africa on a path of sustained growth and development in this new century. Both initiatives are also based on the premise that Africa must assume the primary responsibility for that effort, with support from the international community. Recognizing these common features, the OAU, meeting in March in Libya, urged that the two efforts be merged. Indeed, in my own consultations with leading figures in the Governments involved, I have stressed the need for consensus so that Africa can work with its international partners with one voice and under one agreed initiative. Our international partners have likewise indicated the desirability and practicality of this. The Millennium Partnership for African Recovery Programme is emerging as the African initiative for development, bringing together all partnership initiatives within a single framework. The Compact for African Recovery is designed to provide technical and analytical support to the MAP. Hence the theme of this Conference is "Implementing the Millennium Partnership for the Africa Recovery Programme: Compact for African Recovery". In discussions with the UN Secretary-General, Mr. Kofi Annan, he agreed that the MAP and Compact are an appropriate response to the Millennium Declaration adopted at last year's Millennium Summit. In brief, our theme is of unusually high political and development significance. Several parts of our agenda are substantive discussions of topics which are an integral part of the proposed Compact. Mr. Chairman, I will say more on the Compact in a short while. In the meantime, I would like to touch upon some of the other salient issues on your agenda, on which I seek your Governments’ legislative guidance. Many of these are also reflected in the Compact, so there is reason to discuss these issues first. Mr. Chairman, There are a number of important statutory issues on the agenda for your consideration. Your comments are solicited on these items to help shape the Commission's work programme for the next biennium. First, is the Report on the Work of the Commission for 1998-2000, which is before you. It reviews the major activities of the Commission including its main policy organs, its subsidiary bodies and the secretariat. The report notes that the reforms at ECA have led to some important new policy and programme initiatives which include the establishment of the African Development Forum (ADF); an important post-conflict reconstruction and development programme; and consultations on ECA's partnership programme. I will touch upon each in turn. I have to admit that I am particularly proud of my colleagues for the way the African Development Forum has taken root in just two years. These forums bring together high-level policy makers, including heads of state, and critically important segments of African society for some of the most productive and exciting discussions on development we have experienced. They require a lot of preparation and follow-up at the national level. In the case of the last ADF, there were 35 national preparatory meetings. A series of national follow-up meetings are in process. I want to thank your Governments and a large number of public and private financial partners for making these forums possible. Building on the success of the 1999 ADF on creating an information economy in Africa and the December 2000 ADF on "AIDS the Greatest Leadership Challenge", ECA is preparing for ADF 2001 on Regional Integration. We are currently working with other regional and sub-regional organizations, as well as the private sector and civil society, on an initiative to conduct regular assessments of integration in Africa. We will publish these assessments in an Annual Report on Integration in Africa. The report will assess the performance of member States and their integration institutions against set objectives, and analyze the role of support institutions such as the OAU, ECA and ADB. A set of objectives is currently being developed in a number of areas to serve as benchmarks for measuring progress. The sectors will include trade and industry; finance and capital markets; infrastructure; human capital; food security; and certain regional commons. Conflict remains the greatest obstacle to development. Promising signs of peace and reconciliation, that are beginning to emerge in some African countries mired in conflict, has done little to change the image of Africa as the region with the highest number of raging conflicts and displaced persons. Preventing war and building peace must, therefore, rank high on Africa's list of priorities in this new millennium. New research undertaken by ECA on the causes of war shows that economic decline, inter-communal inequalities, the absence of democratic institutions, and crises in state legitimacy are the major predisposing factors with respect to intra-state conflicts. Military means have proved ineffective in addressing these problems. Good governance and equitable, effective development policies and programmes are the best long-term security measures. In this context, I am pleased to inform you of an ECA-led initiative aimed at forging consensus among UN agencies, multilateral institutions, governments and civil society on the need to develop regional, holistic and long-term approaches to post-conflict reconstruction. Known as the Mano River Basin initiative, the initial programme is currently being developed to assist the three Mano River Basin countries of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone to rebuild their shattered economies. It is my hope that the lessons from this comprehensive programme will be applied to other regions of the continent which are emerging from conflict. The third initiative I want to mention is the new approach we have adopted to the work of building and sustaining partnerships. We believe the time is right to search for more fundamental relationships with Africa's development partners and that the result will be both higher quality partnerships and the confidence to increase the volume of support. Our search for better partner-ship for Africa's development led to the creation of what we call the "Big Table". It is intended as a regular gathering of leading African Ministers of finance and their OECD counterparts to informally discuss the state of African development and African-donor partnerships. We held the first meeting of the "Big Table" last November in Addis Ababa on the occasion of the eighth session of the Conference of Ministers of Finance. The discussions were both refreshing and marked by unanticipated consensus. Many of the ideas from that meeting were embodied in the ideas behind the Compact for Africa's Recovery. I also want to report that the concept of partnership is so attractive, we established one for ECA. In collaboration with partners, the Friends of ECA has been formed in order to broaden and deepen support to the Commission. I am happy to report that certain leading governments, permit me to mention with pleasure the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, have responded with significantly higher levels of support to ECA. Mr. Chairman, Also before you is a document entitled, Proposed Programme of Work and Priorities for the Biennium 2002-2003. This document highlights key programme priorities, including the main objectives, activities and expected impact, consistent with the Medium-Term Plan for the period 2002-2005. The work programme is designed to assist member States in their efforts to achieve poverty reduction, and to cope with the challenges and opportunities of globalisation. To this end, a new subprogramme on promoting trade and mobilising finance for development will be established in the forthcoming biennium to help African economies to enhance their competitiveness in the new global trading system. As those of you who have lived with us through our reform know, we have been very careful about restricting the number of work programmes. We went from 21 programmes six years ago to six today, plus a cross-cutting theme of gender. But globalization and finance issues, as reflected in the need for a new Compact, require focused and high-level attention. So we have made an exception by adding this new programme. I look forward to your suggestions on the proposed work programme. Your views will be reflected in our own thinking and will be transmitted to the Committee for Programme Coordination of the UN General Assembly. Mr. Chairman, The critical challenge to development posed by the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa will be another important theme of your discussions over the course of the next few days. You will recall that the resolution adopted by the 1999 Joint Conference included a call to African leaders to place the HIV/AIDS issue at the centre of their development strategies. Subsequent to that, ADF 2000 focused on the need for leadership across African societies to cope with HIV/AIDS. The Forum adopted the African Consensus and Plan of Action. The Consensus and Plan stressed the need to adopt multisectoral strategies to prevent HIV/AIDS and care for those living with this disease. In this context, the finance and planning functions were identified as particularly important in order to assure that a great many governmental functions are properly contributing to the solution of the pandemic. In terms of finance, recent estimates have put the annual resource requirements to fight HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa to be at least US$ 7 billion per year. Only last week, a special summit of the OAU held in the Nigerian capital city of Abuja, endorsed the African Consensus and Plan of Action on HIV/AIDS. At that Summit, the UN Secretary-General called for the creation of a Global Fund for HIV/AIDS on the order of US$ 7-10 billion. In this regard, I wish to call to your attention the specific recommendation of the Abuja Summit that states allocate no less than 15 percent of their national budgets for health, including HIV/AIDS. I recognized that this is but another of what must sometimes seem like staggering demands upon your budgets. You have your normal governmental functions to finance, you have the call of the international development targets which implies major shifts towards a pro-poor and pro-human services budget, and now you have this call to combat HIV/AIDS and other health crises by allocating 15 percent of your budgets to health issues. Our collective challenge is to find ways to get double and triple duty from our budgets, to find out how, for example, expenditures in education can enable the teaching of health messages while also helping to meet the specific international development goals in education. There are synergies possible. I think we can learn from some of these synergies by discussing the ways you are meeting these challenges. Mr. Chairman, You have before you a document prepared by the ECA secretariat entitled, "Compact for African Recovery: Operationalising the Millennium Partnership for the African Recovery Programme". As I noted earlier, this was prepared in response to a resolution of the ECA Conference of African Ministers of Finance, adopted at their eighth session in November 2000. It is the result of extensive consultation with the MAP initiators, with partners outside of Africa, with the UN family, and with a great many of your governments. This has gone hand in hand with briefings by the MAP leaders in a number of high level settings. The MAP and therefore the Compact focuses on selected key priority areas intended to enable Africa to achieve accelerated growth and development. These include a heavy stress on promoting good governance and conflict prevention. You will also find quite a discussion on the need to improve general performance through sound macro-economic policies, working towards a healthy and well-educated population, a structurally diversified economy, low external dependency and an economy with low transaction costs and much higher savings. The Compact proposes joint African and international action in four areas:
In terms of partnership modalities, the Compact focuses on issues of aid, debt relief and trade access. You will be discussing governance and peace later this morning, and bridging the digital divide, regional integration and debt, scheduled for tomorrow. These topics are reflected in the MAP and the Compact and thus have a special relevance in this conference. The Compact includes an innovative and potentially significant contribution to the discussion of development cooperation with its proposal for a transformed partnership between Africa's best-performing countries and their development partners, as a means of improving the effectiveness of aid. This wider partnership will be underpinned by the following guiding principles:
The Compact paper cites many instances where some individual guiding principles are already being instituted. We also propose the use of a number of indices being developed and launched by ECA to guide implementation of the Compact on as objective and transparent a basis as possible. The discussion Saturday morning on transforming partnerships with Africa should provide added background to you on this aspect of the Compact. A separate chapter of the Compact is devoted to increasing the flow of foreign direct investment and domestic private investment. This is a vital topic as over time there must be a shift from aid to private investment. Economies with vibrant private investment are less dependent upon aid and have a wider range of creativity in economic performance. Finally, the paper presents some ideas on implementing the Compact which are consistent with the political vision of the MAP. Mr. Chairman, This meeting provides the first opportunity for African policy makers to give their perspectives on all these aspects of the proposed Compact. We particularly invite your views on the following questions:
Your discussions, here in the capital of the one of three originators of the MAP, will help advance both the ownership and the details of achieving a new acceleration of development and a new way of working with partners in the international community. These discussions can also facilitate appreciation by all stakeholders of the operational implications and the mutuality of commitments implied under the proposed partnership, and help rally international support for an African-led development agenda. Mr. Chairman, Good and dedicated people have for the last generation and more worked on many of these issues. Their visions have only been partially realized. We propose a new Compact because we do not want our children meeting thirty years from now debating these same topics. We want them to be enjoying the fruits of a far more developed Africa, an Africa built on solid foundations of good governance, an Africa whose people have benefited from an endowment of universal education and health; an Africa with many of our countries graduated from aid; and an Africa which is beyond talking unity, but actually living in unity. My colleagues and I value your contributions over the next days as we know that you share this same vision for your children. I wish you every success in your deliberations on what are indeed watershed issues, and I look forward to passing on your report to the Ministers. Thank you and Godspeed. |