UNSIA Newsletter Issue 2, November 1998

Table of Contents

ACC stresses collective responsibility

On 6 March 1998, in Geneva, Mr. James Gustave Speth, UNDP Administrator and co-chair of the ACC Steering Committee on the SIA, urged steady progress into the third year of the Initiative. He invited participants to contribute actively and send confirmation to the Secretary-General that his message in the special issue of the UNpublication Africa Recovery, affirming his leadership of SIA, was galvanizing new efforts.

Mr. K.Y. Amoako, ECA's Executive Secretary and co-chair of the ACC Steering Committee on the SIA, stressed the importance of the leadership demonstrated by coordinating agencies. The maturation of this collaborative process remains somewhat uneven, he noted, and said that "the success of the Special Initiative is the collective responsibility of the United Nations as expressed by all Executive Heads during the launch in March 1996."

The meeting acknowledged that efforts by UN coordinating and cooperating agencies in the priority areas of education, health, governance, and harnessing information technology for development have demonstrated that the SIA is taking hold. It encouraged the lead agencies for these sectors to expand country coverage and deepen field-level implementation. The meeting also recognized the significant work being undertaken by lead agencies in other priority areas such as food security, trade, poverty reduction through informal sector development, and water, and offered concrete recommendations to spur progress in these areas:

• Recognizing that food security has cross-sector implications, FAO was asked to consider bringing the African follow-up to the World Food Summit within SIA.
• UNCTAD was asked to organize a technical working group of United Nations cooperating agencies to take advantage of collaborative work already underway in the area of trade and investment. UNIDO was invited to participate in the context of the Alliance for Africa's Industrialization.
• The International Labour Organization (ILO) presented a programme for poverty reduction through informal sector development with a price tag of $1.5 billion. ILO was requested to organize a technical working group meeting on this proposal to work out a division of responsibilities for future action and clarify a sound resource mobilization strategy. The meeting is now scheduled to take place on 13 November 1998 in Addis Ababa.
• UNEP, lead agency in various aspects of water development, acknowledged that progress was impeded by scarce resources and unclear division of responsibilities in some components. The coordinating agencies were therefore requested to consult with interested United Nations agencies, to prepare a technical issues paper to streamline activities in this cluster. A technical working group meeting should be called by the coordinating agencies.
• The World Bank, UNDP, ECA and other interested agencies should convene a meeting to review the experience of resource mobilization in the different priority areas, and for the Special Initiative as a whole, in view of proposing strategies for replication of identified best practices.
• The above mentioned Technical Working Group meetings will discuss strategies to spur progress and identify substantive issues impeding implementation, for further discussions at Steering Committee and ACC meetings.
• Executive Heads were called upon to continue to provide clear guidance to their field representatives to ensure optimal collaboration in promoting country-level implementation of SIA. This recommendation was endorsed by ACC.