The New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) is still not widely known or well understood across the continent or internationally. With this publication, we hope that you will learn more about NEPAD’s vision and course. We also hope that such knowledge will make it easier for you to join in the efforts to make that vision a reality.
At the turn of the millennium, African leaders and their citizens started looking to the future with renewed hope. The continent had come through decades of economic stagnation, poverty, corruption, authoritarian rule and devastating wars. But the end of the 1990s brought the first signs of a new turn. Some of the region’s most protracted conflicts had begun to wind down. Economic growth rates picked up. And in country after country, pro-democracy movements succeeded in replacing repressive regimes with elected governments. Those positive trends gave rise to a heightened sense of purpose as well: for Africans to take charge of their own future.
Such aspirations for a continent-wide renewal found expression in the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). Adopted at a July 2001 summit meeting of African heads of state, the plan for the region’s long-term development expressed the determination of African peoples “to extricate themselves and the continent from the malaise of underdevelopment and exclusion in a globalizing world.” It called for a new relationship between Africa and the international community, in which the non-African partners would seek to complement the region’s own efforts. The United Nations, the major industrialized nations and various donor agencies pledged to extend their support.
Several years after NEPAD’s launch, the plan has registered some notable advances. The articles in this special reprint edition of Africa Renewal provide a glimpse of the changes that NEPAD has introduced and the actions it has promoted, from agriculture and roads to nutrition and education. In line with NEPAD’s principles, African governments have also sought to improve the way they govern and to engage with foreign donors and investors on a more equal footing. Through their continental political organization, the African Union, they are also acting more energetically to try to resolve Africa’s continuing armed conflicts.
The articles selected here also reflect some of the debates surrounding NEPAD and the challenges confronting its implementation. While some advocates have emphasized the plan’s progress, others — including a few of its initiators — have expressed disappointment with the results achieved so far.
Most agree that one of the more notable achievements is the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM). It is a voluntary self-assessment scheme in which participating African governments submit their standards and practices of political, economic and social governance to evaluation by other Africans. As of October 2007, more than half of all African governments, some 27 countries, had signed on to take part in the peer review. Although some civil society groups initially criticized NEPAD as “top down” — since it was drawn up and launched by African heads of state, with little public consultation — the peer reviews have provided some scope for non-governmental actors to assess their own leaders’ performance and to recommend further reforms. More generally, NEPAD’s promoters have demonstrated flexibility by incorporating the ideas of African critics and soliciting their involvement in its implementation. When NEPAD was first launched, for example, women’s groups censured the plan for paying insufficient attention to gender issues. But since then the NEPAD Secretariat, based in South Africa, has set up a gender and civil society unit, headed by one of the women’s rights activists who were earlier critical.
Within the broad framework of NEPAD, African experts, in collaboration with the UN’s specialized agencies and other external partners, have made headway in identifying the programmes and policies that African countries and regional organizations need to pursue. The Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme, completed in 2003, urges investments in three selected “pillars”: extending sustainable land and water management, increasing the food supply, and improving rural infrastructure and capacities for market access.
The African Union and the NEPAD Secretariat also launched a plan of action for science and technology, to draw on and further develop the knowledge of Africa’s researchers, students, business leaders and villagers. Some of the practical benefits of NEPAD initiatives are already visible, including:
Since one of NEPAD’s goals is to bring African countries closer together and promote trade and other exchanges among them, plans to develop regional road, power and other infrastructure networks have been a high priority. But concrete projects have been slow to get off the ground. Not only are the sums needed to build them large, but securing agreement among multiple African governments and foreign financial institutions is a complex undertaking. African planners note that some regional highway projects in Europe have taken years, even decades, to develop and build.
International promises
When NEPAD was first unveiled, the continent’s wealthy donor and trade partners hailed the plan as a framework for increased support to the continent. There have been some signs of greater external backing. The International Monetary Fund, World Bank and bilateral creditors granted debt relief to 18 of Africa’s poorest countries, reducing their debt burdens by tens of billions of dollars. The big industrialized countries’ Group of Eight (G-8) pledged in 2005 to increase aid to Africa by $25 bn by 2010, and at their 2007 summit promised $60 bn “over the coming years” to help Africa combat HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other infectious diseases.
But the reality has not always matched the promise. Aid to Africa has actually risen by only 2 per cent since 2004. At that rate of increase, by 2010, the G-8 countries would miss the commitments they made in 2005 by some $30 bn.
On the trade front, high tariffs and other protectionist measures in the rich countries of the North have impeded African access to those markets. Continuing high subsidies to farmers in the US and Europe have depressed world prices for the cotton and other agricultural products that Africa exports, thus hindering its efforts to earn more from trade. Foreign investors also remain hesitant to put large amounts of capital into a continent that is still affected by political instability and weak infrastructure.
Given Africa’s own limited financial means, the difficulties and uncertainties of its external economic relations inevitably affect the pace at which NEPAD’s ambitious programmes and projects can be realized. But an important aspect of NEPAD is its emphasis on self-reliance. As much as possible, African countries are expected to mobilize more of their own domestic resources, by fighting corruption and waste, promoting local entrepreneurial activities and widening the tax base.
African governments must take the lead, including by integrating NEPAD’s goals and priorities into their national development plans, says Mr. Firmino Mucavele, chief executive officer of the NEPAD Secretariat. Presenting a NEPAD implementation report to a session of the Pan-African Parliament, meeting in South Africa in November 2006, he argued that insufficient national consensus or a lack of involvement by all stakeholders can slow on-the-ground projects. “NEPAD should not be seen as a separate thing from national programmes,” he said.
Speaking a few months later at an April 2007 NEPAD conference in Senegal, Mozambique’s former president Joaqium Chissano made a similar point. “We cannot expect everything from others,” he stressed. “We have to start working with what little we have, and then others will have the will and desire to help us.”