Africa needs better governance and more efficient knowledge portfolios for its development
By Yinka Adeyemi, Communication Officer,SDD, ECA
07 October 2004

Knowledge has become the essence and the chief currency of modern age, says Dr. Jacques Hamel, a member of the Science, Technology and Innovation Team at ECA’s Sustainable Development Division.

Discussing his new paper, Knowledge Policies for Sustainable Development in Africa: A Strategic Framework for Good Governance, Dr. Hamel said knowledge could be a strategic resource and a lifeline for Africa’s sustainable development, which can promote the acceleration of economic growth, the rehabilitation of the resource base and the realization of an African Green Revolution.

These are core conditions of sustainable development. Indeed, sound environmental management, poverty reduction and food security are among the critical mainstays of sustainable development, incorporating key MDGs targets.

Hamel said African economies had been involuntarily drawn into a knowledge race in which they may turn out to be losers in the absence of adequate development and governance strategies. Not enough effort is being made to emphasize the centrality of knowledge for sustainable development and to face the challenge of creating vibrant and competitive knowledge societies. This requires better governance and adequate knowledge policies, he said.

Indeed, Africa must invest massively in knowledge to improve the social soil and environment on which it grows, keep abreast of knowledge development, set in motion dynamic knowledge-creating processes, reduce knowledge deficits, free knowledge bases from impurities, strengthen knowledge infrastructures and institutions, fight knowledge obsolescence, reduce constraints to knowledge sharing and diffusion and increase knowledge performance. It must embark on a new adventure of knowledge and realize a knowledge renaissance for knowledge-led sustainable development.

Increasing the efficiency of knowledge for meeting sustainable development challenges requires further deprivatizing, secularizing, strategizing, refocusing, ‘de-ethnicizing’, globalizing, modernizing, feminizing and improving governance, said Hamel.

Click here for the full text of Dr. Hamel’s paper, Knowledge Policies for Sustainable Development in Africa: A Strategic Framework for Good Governance. For feedback: jhamel@uneca.org