Address

by K.Y. Amoako
Executive Secretary
Economic Commission for Africa
Addis Ababa, 15-16 May 2003

Dear Colleagues

I am pleased to see you once again in Addis and with such a large turnout of agencies. I am particularly pleased to welcome professor Wiseman Nkuhlu, the chairperson of the NEPAD steering committee.

In our last meeting, last year, we agreed on a way forward

Let me recap what we agreed on.

Last year, five clusters were established around the NEPAD priority areas and identified convening agencies.

We agreed on modalities for cooperation at the regional and subregional level, agreed that clusters would identify quick wins for implementation for 2003 and 2004.

We underscored the importance of capacity building of RECs in implementing NEPAD programmes at the subregional level.

We agreed on a common reporting mechanism whereby the consolidated cluster report would be coordinated by ECA and submitted to OSSA for inclusion in the Secretary-General's report on Africa.

I would like to highlight the progress we have made thus far.

All clusters have met at least twice and submitted their reports, which were consolidated, and sent to New York for the CPC report. They were also used for the HLCP reporting requirements. We have also shared this report with NEPAD.

From a reading of the reports and the participation of the coordination team in many of the cluster meetings, I can report that progress remains uneven. Some clusters have advanced further than others. Some clusters are still at the early stages of discussion. And concrete activities have yet to be agreed on. Still, several subclusters, for instance, HIV/AIDS, Water, and Governance, have narrowed their activities and agreed on a division of labour and time lines for implementation. We look forward to hearing from others who have made similar progress.

However, many challenges still remain in our system-wide support of NEPAD, some of which are identified in the Issues Note that you have received. We will be discussing these issues in a little while under Agenda Item 3.

In my mind, the expected outcomes of this meeting would be to draw on best practices, lessons learned to resolve some of the outstanding challenges and come up with an implementation plan that identifies concrete activities for delivery within a specified timeframe. I would hope that we will have concrete results to report when we meet next in October.