Statement

by K. Y. Amoako,
Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa
to the twenty-first meeting of the Committee of Experts
of the Conference of African Ministers of Finance, Planning and Economic Development

Johannesburg, South Africa
16 October 2002

Honourable Chairman,
Honourable Deputy Minister of Finance Mandisi Mpahlwa,
Excellencies,
Distinguished Experts,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is my pleasure to welcome you all to Sandton for this important meeting of the experts of the Conference of African ministers of Finance, Planning and Economic Development.

I would like to thank the Deputy Minister for his insightful and excellent opening remarks. And on behalf of all participants, I also wish to express sincere gratitude to the Government and people of the Republic of South Africa for so graciously hosting this meeting.

As those of you who have been to these meetings know, we can count on this excellent group to be serious, constructive and productive. This makes it a special pleasure to be with you.

To begin, I would like to briefly review the international environment for development which has been created since our Algiers meeting. Then I will review ECA's work as it relates to the unfolding agenda. I will then discuss NEPAD and the key agenda issues which arise from its creation. I will end with a suggestion for your report to the Conference.

Eighteen months ago in Algiers the Conference of Ministers charged ECA both to help broker the merger of the Omega Plan and the Millennium Partnership for the Africa Recovery Programme and to provide support in implementing the merged effort. The merged effort is NEPAD, and we have been working vigorously to support it.

It is fair to say that the climate for development cooperation has improved markedly since we last met. This was first evident in the World Trade Organization's meetings in Doha, Qatar, last November, launching a three-year "development round" of negotiations. This improving climate continued at the UN's Financing for Development Conference in Monterrey, Mexico, in March, with announcements of innovations in the quality of finance and several pledges to increase the quantity of finance. In Rome in June, the World Food Summit plus five added attention to agriculture and hunger issues. The G-8 meeting in Kananaskis, Canada, produced a major G-8 plan to assist Africa. The African Union was created in July with extraordinary potential for us all. Last month here in Johannesburg the pursuit of poverty reduction was merged with environmental sustainability at the World Summit on Sustainable Development. And a few weeks ago the Bank/Fund meetings produced forward motion on some key issues.

Given that many of us were at these meetings, I need only to note that most of these events were helpful to Africa. A new momentum for Africa has been created which is quite promising for our development. Good political leadership, stemming particularly from NEPAD's political leaders; diligent preparation; solidarity in most of our positions; real help from leading figures in the OECD and UN; and very good negotiations by African delegates-made a big difference in the outcomes.

ECA has devoted significant resources to help prepare member States for these events over the last 18 months.

We have made great strides in our economic and social policy analysis. Our 2002 Economic Report on Africa provides an overview of the region's general performance as well as seven in-depth country studies demonstrating a range of economic performances. We are now measuring the robustness of policies and policy environments across the continent with new indicators we have devised. We are also measuring and publishing analyses of economic, environmental and institutional sustainability-and in the process are broadening understanding of the value of constructive long-term policies.

We continue to deepen our research on poverty and are promoting knowledge-sharing through our African Learning Group on PRSPs. Our social policy and poverty team has created a Health Economics Unit to serve as a focal point on HIV/AIDS, in part as a follow up to our second African Development Forum. And we have followed up our work in support of WTO's Doha meeting by developing a comprehensive trade-related capacity building and training programme.

Our sustainable development emphasis is also reflected in our work on the inter-linkages among population, agriculture and environment. We are working on monitoring the conditions for sustainable development and are providing advisory services in this area.

Our work on gender aims to mainstream gender concerns in development policies. We have developed an African Gender and Development Index-to be released next year-to help policymakers understand gender inequality and the progress towards meeting national goals and international conventions.

The topic of our third African Development Forum, conducted in collaboration with the OAU this past March, was to define priorities for regional integration. The recommendations from this Forum are proving useful in establishing the African Union's programme of work. Shortly we will publish the first edition of our new Report on Integration in Africa. Monitoring and analyzing integration efforts across the continent, will help member States, regional bodies and NEPAD in determining needs and priorities.

NEPAD is also very much on our minds in our governance work. Our first bi-annual Africa Governance Report will be released at the fourth African Development Forum, which will focus on governance issues late next year. Studies at monitoring progress towards good governance and assessing capacity gaps are now being conducted in 14 countries. This work will be centrally useful to our technical support of NEPAD.

In information and communication technologies, ECA continues to help member States develop and implement their national ICT plans within the framework of the African Information Society Initiative. At the regional level, we are working to help harmonize policies and infrastructure development.

There has also been very active support in preparing Africa for the World Summit on the Information Society and in assisting NEPAD's work on information and communications technologies.

We are also providing valuable support in the field. Our network of Subregional Development Centres (SRDCs) is working in close collaboration with major Regional Economic Communities (RECs) to assist ongoing efforts towards closer economic cooperation and integration in the five subregions. And we remain committed to our work in post-conflict reconstruction in the Mano River Basin and in the Great Lakes through our SRDCs in West Africa and East Africa respectively.

In sum, the last 18 months has been a time of tremendous activity in the global development environment. The international focus is now clearly on Africa. And there finally seems to be some advance on crucial issues that affect us deeply. We at the Economic Commission for Africa have learned to better time our major analyses to help member States prepare positions for key forums. We have worked closer than ever with members in formulating positions. Facts plus solidarity are a winning combination.

Our work is the direct outcome of a reform process we launched together six years ago. That process of institutional renewal involved much sharper programme focus, improved intergovernmental processes, raising the bar on staff performance and modernizing many features of our work. Our African Development Forums and the latest Economic Report on Africa demonstrate the quality, as well as the policy and media impact, we can achieve.

Through our "Friends of ECA" donor grouping, we are now holding a regular dialogue on our work with several partners. This has led a number of them to provide us with programme and budget support. The Netherlands, Sweden, United Kingdom and Norway, have been key partners in this regard. Canada and Germany have also pledged increased support.

Now, in line with the UN Secretary-General's latest package of reforms to strengthen the organization as a whole, we, at ECA, are committed to a new round of reform to achieve Commission-wide excellence. We plan to do this by focusing on these four priority areas:

• First, improving the budgeting and management information systems that underpin our administration,

• Second, building and retaining our human capacity,

• Third, strengthening our field presence by building upon best practices in our sub-regional development centers,

• And fourth, strengthening our internal communications among an increasingly vibrant and strong staff.

We have identified the need to augment our 2002-2005 plan in areas that could not have been clearly anticipated when it was adopted in December 2000. We now believe the priorities of the Commission should include supporting the NEPAD process; helping to backstop implementation of the Abuja Summit on HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and other related infectious Diseases; expanding our work on the PRSP process; and strengthening statistical development that supports more and more of the processes vital to management of development cooperation under NEPAD. You will see these proposed changes in papers circulated for this meeting.

As you can tell from my review of ECA's activities, our work focuses on the African development agenda. NEPAD's objective is to help deliver the resources and political will to accelerate the implementation of that agenda. So it is to be expected that ECA's work is relevant to NEPAD. The major new reports I have described will materially help NEPAD by providing a factual underpinning for its work. Moreover, our approach to NEPAD has been neither casual nor remote. We have provided a continuing stream of inputs, concepts and information to the NEPAD Secretariat. We have worked closely to develop the core concepts and operating practicalities of the governance and peer review process.

NEPAD is an important framework for Africa's development. It does not replace national sovereignty. But it does reinforce progress and makes the consequences of domestic choices more important. It is not 'one size fits all', as it gives very clear recognition and embraces the situations in which our countries find themselves. And while it encourages countries to agree to peer review of governance, it certainly forces no country to do so. Five NEPAD-related issues are presented to you in the issues paper. For each one we suggest key questions that we believe should be addressed in the recommendations you provide to your Ministers.

The first issue involves sound policymaking and operationalizing development goals. NEPAD is crafted to operate in common frameworks. NEPAD embraces achieving the Millennium Development Goals, planning comprehensive Poverty Reduction Strategies and implementing those strategies through solid public expenditure management. These processes are being better understood through the African PRSP Learning Group. New innovations may well be needed. Our issues paper mentions Public Expenditure Review Commissions and gender-based budgeting as two innovations now being worked on in various countries. I urge you all to share best practices so that you can make crisp recommendations on how capacities and policy mixes can be improved in planning and implementation.

A second significant issue is increasing the role of the private sector in poverty reduction. The discussion is more nuanced and Africa-centered than is usual in discussions of the private sector. NEPAD's success is more dependent on Africa's private sector than any previous strategy. We should build on the African Union's July Declaration on Democracy, Political, Economic and Corporate Governance to maximize government partnership with domestic private sectors, particularly at the small and medium scale in which African participation is dominant. Here, you will need to provide ministers with concrete proposals on the steps that need to be taken to effectively improve and promote national investment climates, particularly for greatly enhanced levels of domestic investment.

Third is the issue of achieving far greater market access in the global economy. NEPAD highlights trade as a key area to stimulate domestic growth. NEPAD's discussions on trade clearly show this to be an issue for planning and finance, as well as trade ministries. The questions are how to be sure trade issues are a key part of finance and planning agendas; how to be sure there is major momentum for breakthroughs on trade policy issues; and how to be sure trade policy can reinforce development.

The fourth issue, central to NEPAD, is how to move to self-monitoring and peer learning, particularly on governance issues. As I have noted, ECA has been particularly active on this issue. The surveys and indicators, which we will introduce at the next African Development Forum, will provide NEPAD with very important country cases and an approach, to underpin NEPAD's peer reviews. These indicators will be concerned with political representation and rights, institutional effectiveness, and economic management and corporate governance.

The most important questions you must answer when discussing this topic are how to hasten the peer review process, how to get it supported internally and externally, and how to operate the process to foster needed changes in national performance.

The final issue is on transforming partnerships-so that a backlog of old issues, like debt, can best be cleared up, while instituting new systems of mutual accountability in which our partners must do in step with us. We should recognize different levels of performance within Africa, and probably among our partners as well. Indeed here, we need to arrive at an African position on workable proposals and solutions, to assure that there is enough additive support to foster achievement of the MDGs, to reduce debt, to successfully turn back HIV/AIDS, and to foster regional integration.

None of these issues is easy, but they are not theoretical. They will in large part determine the success of NEPAD.

Now for the hard part. Past reports by the experts have perhaps erred on the side of being long narratives rather than providing punchy, actionable conclusions and recommendations. This has meant that multi-lingual production of your reports has dragged into the very late hours, often forcing late delivery of these reports to ministers. Understandably, some people have become upset. The discussion of long reports has taken too much time and often strayed from the real focus of your valuable conclusions and recommendations. I propose that we work together to produce a statement of about 15 pages so that the secretariat can remedy production and procedural problems, as much as possible, and so that your Ministers can be helped to truly focus on the important and the essential.

Friends,

I realize that I have not been a model of brevity myself! But my report to you had to cover a remarkable period of activity and opportunity. I end as I began: grateful for your collaboration and guidance, thankful for your commendable dedication to making ECA a better servant for Africa, and appreciative of the insights and wisdom you always bring to the key problems of Africa's development.

Thank you very much.