Geneva, 21 July 1999
ECE/GEN/99/20
STATEMENT BY
MR. K.Y. AMOAKO, EXECUTIVE SECRETARY OF THE
ECONOMIC COMMISSION FOR AFRICA (ECA),
TO THE
ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COUNCIL
(Geneva, 21
July 1999)
Mr President,
Distinguished Delegates,
I welcome the opportunity to
participate, once again, in the annual ECOSOC discussion of
the work of the regional commissions and review of the
economic and social trends in each of the regions of the
world. The report of the Secretary-General on regional
co-operation and the Annual Report on the work of ECA are
before you. They highlight the key activities undertaken by
ECA in the past year. You will recall that at my previous
presentation to this body, I emphasized the nature of the
reforms we were carrying out at ECA in order to assist our
member States to respond to their development challenges in a
more effective manner. Permit me, Mr. Chairman, to express my
appreciation for the support and encouragement we received
from ECOSOC and the Commission in implementing these reforms.
At its 33rd Meeting, in Addis Ababa in May this year, the Commission
noted that the reform and renewal process, which began in
1996, was almost complete. It concluded that the General
Assembly instructions in resolutions 50/227 of 1996, and
52/12B of 1997, instructing the regional commissions to
rationalise their operations, had been carried out. Noting
that there was now evidence of significant improvement in the
impact of ECA's services to member States, the meeting also
noted that the reforms had begun to yield tangible results.
Recent outputs, among them the 1998 Economic Report on
Africa and the documentation and processes associated
with the Joint Conference of the Ministers of Finance and
Economic Planning, have been cited as tangible evidence of
this improvement.
With the reforms and
improved internal capacity, ECA has used its comparative
advantage, including its convening power, to:
facilitate a process of
consensus-building among the key stakeholders of African
development;
promote knowledge- and
information-sharing, best practices among Member States,
including lessons learned from African models and other
parts of the developing world;
facilitate the
application by African decision-makers of relevant policy
research outputs from African researchers through the
strengthening of links between policy research and
analysis and decision-making processes;
serve as a policy
advocate on critical development issues; address
sub-regional and regional dimensions of development
issues, which are beyond the purview of most development
agencies, which are country-focused; offer an active
programme of advisory services to Member States that
utilizes the technical expertise available within African
research networks; and
build capacity in Member
States and at the regional and sub-regional levels,
through programmes of institutional support, including
training seminars and workshops aimed at developing the
skills needed to realize programme objectives in
addressing the development challenges at hand.
As I pointed out two days
ago, we at ECA are very much aware of the strong linkages
between the issues identified in the report of the UN
Secretary-General on the AThe Causes of Conflict and the Promotion of
Durable Peace and Sustainable Development in Africa" and
the development challenges underlying the ECA programmes. ECA
has articulated these challenges, as well as its responses,
in a new publication entitled The ECA and Africa:
Accelerating a Continent's Development. Furthermore, it has
discussed these challenges extensively with its member
States. Permit me, Mr. Chairman, to focus on a few activities
that ECA is undertaking, in partnership with its development
partners, to assist in addressing the challenges in question.
As we enter the next
millennium, the underlying feature of the challenges Africa
faces is poverty, and its reduction must be the ultimate goal
of development activities in the continent. The widespread
and deep-seated poverty in Africa has major policy
dimensions. To reduce poverty in Africa by half by the year
2015 (a goal ratified at the World Summit for Social
Development in 1995 and endorsed by African Heads of State
and Government) will require a 4 per cent reduction each year
in the number of people living in absolute poverty. This in
turn depends on the successful implementation of broad social
and economic policy measures, sustained GDP growth rates of
at least 7 per cent per annum, equitable sharing of the
benefits of growth, and investment rates of more than 30 per
cent of GDP. This compares to the present 16 per cent, and to
25 per cent in East Asia.
On the basis of current
experience and research a consensus has emerged that Africa's
policy and reform agenda need to focus on the following
elements:
Mainstreaming and
integrating population, environment, science and
technology, and productivity concerns into national
development planning and poverty-alleviation frameworks
and policies;
Investing in the social
sectors, including education, health (particularly
responding to the AIDS pandemic) and
employment-generating programmes that target and reach
the poor and improve their quality of life;
Addressing the very
pronounced gender dimension of poverty in Africa and
empowering women to fully contribute to economic and
social progress of the continent;
Participating in the
information revolution, which requires that Africa
develop capacity to tap into the global system of
information and knowledge;
Pursuing Africa's
integration into the global economy, alongside enhanced
intra-regional integration and co-operation;
Establishing and
sustaining good governance systems, by fostering greater
stakeholder participation in governance and
decision-making relevant to the broad spectrum of the
development process; and
Overcoming the legacy of
conflict. An immediate challenge is to promote peace and
security, both through conflict prevention and a prompt
resolution of disputes. The recent conclusion of peace
agreements in some countries paves the way for post
conflict peace building and development. But it is highly
imperative that these agreements stick and that
development agencies seize the moment and use this window
of opportunity to build bridges to consolidate peace as a
foundation for future development.
What has ECA been doing, and
what does it plan to do to assist member States in meeting
these challenges? I will not review the list of all new
programme initiatives in support of these efforts. But I
would like to refer to a fewCthe challenge of financing development, which
underlies all the above-listed challenges, the issues of
priorities for development and consensus-building around
those priorities, and the imperatives of globalisation and
regional integration for Africa.
The Challenge of Resource
Flows: Against the challenge of inadequate and
diminishing resource flows for development financing, the
Commission convened a Joint Conference of African Ministers
of Economic Planning and of Finance in May 1999 under the
theme, "The Challenges of Financing Development in
Africa". An important outcome of the Conference was the
Ministerial Debate, which was attended by top researchers and
practitioners in this field, as well as the Joint Ministerial
Statement, which articulated Africa's views on the
inter-related issues of Official Development Assistance,
debt, foreign direct investment, domestic resource
mobilisation, capital flight from Africa and reform of the
international financial architecture. Debt relief as a key
element in the financing plan was the high point of the
debate and recommendations emerging from it.
The Ministers urged
industrial countries, particularly the G-7 nations, to take
the lead in agreeing to complete cancellation of debt arising
from bilateral aid for the poorest countries, reduce all
other bilateral debt of the poorest countries by at least 90
per cent, review the HIPC Initiative to enable more countries
to benefit from debt relief, and to substantially increase
funding for the Initiative. The ministers emphasised the need
to foster a new donor-beneficiary relationship whereby
multi-donor programmes focus on an African-driven agenda.
They also stressed the importance of adequate representation
of Africa and its views on all international
intergovernmental bodies that may be set up to consider
reforms of the international financial and monetary system.
This common position was transmitted to the June 1999 G-7
summit in Cologne.
As a follow up to the
Ministerial statement and the Cologne Debt Initiative, ECA
will be co-sponsoring with the World Bank and the IMF, a
seminar to review the HIPC Initiative, with a view to
ensuring that savings realised from debt relief initiatives
are channelled into programmes for sustainable poverty
reduction. African countries consider the HIPC initiative
important as a means of providing them with a clear exit from
unsustainable debt that has constrained their performance.
Consensus building and
Africa's leadership on critical elements of Africa's
development agenda: ECA is launching the African
Development Forum (ADF) process. This process will foster
heightened leadership of the continent's development agenda
by Africans, facilitate consensus-building among the key
stakeholders in Africa's development, and foster partnerships
which respond to a vision of development shared by Africa's
stakeholders. ADF is designed to bring more cohesion in donor
support for Africa's development. The annual forum will
define time-bound actionable programmes that can be
implemented within the capacity of African countries. The
first forum, whose theme is "The Challenge to Africa
of Globalization and the Information Age", will take
place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia from 25-28 October 1999. Among
other things, it will showcase the partnership that has
developed over the last few years among public-and
private-sector interests, UN agencies and the World Bank for
the promotion of information and communication technologies
in Africa under the coordination of ECA. In addition, African
countries will present national action plans to accelerate
their information and communications infrastructures for
implementation in the year 2000 with assistance from ECA and
its partners.
Globalization and the
regional integration imperative: Globalization and
liberalization of the world economy, greater integration of
financial and capital markets, and a shift towards the
creation of large trading and economic blocs are realities
Africa has to face. These developments offer not only
challenges and opportunities to Africa, but also point to the
need to sharpen its regional integration strategy. Africa's
economic recovery and development, as well as its ability to
be effectively integrated into the world economy, are
intrinsically linked to its capacity to become an active
player in the world economy. The two imperatives are
interdependent and should be pursued in parallel.
Thus, at ECA, we continue to
emphasize the promotion of regional economic integration as a
fundamental pre-requisite for Africa's development. Indeed,
ECA has a major sub-programme devoted to fostering regional
cooperation and integration. In cooperation with the
Organization of African Unity (OAU) and the African
Development Bank (ADB), under the Joint Secretariat of the
AEC, ECA is supporting the implementation of the Abuja
Treaty. To achieve the goal of regional integration, ECA has
strengthened its Sub Regional Development Centres (SRDCs) to
provide technical support to the Regional Economic
Communities (RECs), while strengthening ECA's outreach in the
sub-regions.
In this context, ECA has
provided assistance in the restructuring of the secretariats
of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and
the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA);
undertaken feasibility studies on self-financing mechanisms
for COMESA, which, in due course, will be extended to SADC;
and also assisted in re-launching the Economic Community of
Central African States (ECCAS). Particular emphasis has also
been laid on Africa's position in world trade through
analysis of the implications of the post-Uruguay-round
economic and trading arrangements on the region's
development. As I speak, Africa experts are meeting in Addis
Ababa under the auspices of ECA and the OAU to prepare for
the WTO Ministerial meeting in Seattle in November 1999.
Conclusion: In
concluding my remarks, I want to emphasize that Africa is
poised to enter the 21st century, with greater
commitment to meeting its development challenges, including
good governance and democracy. We consider the deliberations
on African development initiatives at the coordination
segment of ECOSOC that ended yesterday and the discussion of
today, in the context of the item of regional cooperation, to
be extremely valuable and useful. It is in this context that
ECA will continue to play its part -- through the Special
Initiative on Africa and the annual regional coordination
meetings of UN agencies -- in fostering coherence towards
enhanced impact of the UN on Africa's development.