"We have to learn to use the immense capacities in Africa, to recognize
what people are doing and see how best we can support it, rather than coming
in with our own agenda and our own ideas of what people should do,"
says Ms. Thelma Awori in an interview with Africa Recovery. She was
appointed Assistant Administrator of the UN Development Programme (UNDP)
and Director of its Regional Bureau for Africa (RBA) in September and succeeds
Ms. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
Broad experience has made Ms. Awori a firm believer in popular participation in the development process. A Ugandan of Liberian origin and a former university lecturer, Ms. Awori has long been an activist in the women's movement. Before joining UNDP, she worked extensively in community mobilization and human resource development. From 1988-92 she was Chief of the Africa Section and then Deputy Director of the UNDP affiliate, the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). She then served as UN Resident Coordinator and UNDP Resident Representative in Zimbabwe until 1996, before returning to New York as Deputy Director of UNDP's Policy and Programme Support Bureau.
With a perspective stretching from community activities to international policy-making, Ms. Awori will advance UNDP efforts to help African countries achieve "national execution" of development programmes. Facing a worrying decline in development aid, African countries have to use all available resources in the most effective and sustainable ways, she says. This means strengthening local ability to coordinate, manage, monitor and evaluate external aid, and making greater use of local expertise. Development work, she adds, "should go beyond the donor/recipient relationship and become a true partnership."
Ms. Awori says that she will encourage African countries to have key ministers present at UNDP Governing Board meetings so that they can "drive the process" and have a "much stronger voice in policy-making." After all, she adds, "it is really their show." This year, funding for UNDP's global core programmes is $500 mn, of which $255 mn is for Africa. Specific funds for post-conflict peace-building and rehabilitation, demobilization and de-mining, and the reintegration of refugees and the internally displaced may add another $200 mn or so to total funding for Africa.
With UNDP a major -- but far from the only -- source of development finance, Ms. Awori sees the need for greater coherence. She expects the Resident Coordinator system and the UN Development Group proposed in the UN Secretary-General's reforms to strengthen partnerships with other donors and make the broader donor community "as user-friendly as possible to host governments."
But in any case, the continent cannot afford the "unbearably high moral, economic, social and political costs" of excluding "a huge segment of our society" from the development process. Exclusion, she adds, is the main cause of poverty and conflict throughout Africa. This makes "inclusion the key development challenge of our time," and dictates an urgent agenda of human and institutional development, and people's empowerment.
Ms. Awori sums up this agenda as one of good governance. It has become a priority for UNDP, receiving half the funding for its work in Africa this year. Countries with open and accountable political systems, which promote participation and have visionary leaders who also know what to do today to realize that vision, "these are countries which are moving ahead."
Besides better economic management, Ms. Awori will continue supporting political, legislative, electoral and judicial reforms. UNDP was deeply involved in the democratic transitions in Mozambique, Angola and South Africa, and is helping rebuild the judiciary and the legislature in Rwanda. It also helped 12 countries prepare national programmes which they presented at the first African Governance Forum hosted by the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), in Addis Ababa last July. This is just one part of UNDP's major role in implementing the UN System-wide Special Initiative on Africa, which it co-chairs with the ECA.
Central to good governance is ending corruption, which Ms. Awori describes as a "cancer," and which UNDP is helping to fight through reforms to promote accountability. She adds that corruption is a global problem requiring "complementary actions by all countries and international institutions."
Ms. Awori notes the linkages between other priority areas for UNDP in Africa, such as poverty eradication and environmental protection. She has no doubt that the overall goal of sustainable human development "will never be achieved" unless basic gender inequities are overcome. UNDP supports projects to help African institutions make gender issues a factor in policy development, training and research. And to overcome "some of the more formidable obstacles to gender equality," the Africa Bureau recently allocated $5.35 mn to the promotion of women's economic empowerment, a network of women's advocates, and women in political leadership, peace building, conflict resolution.
Ms. Awori is chairperson of the African Women in Crisis (AFWIC) project, launched in 1993 by UNIFEM. The project has helped refugee and displaced women prepare to return home by providing reproductive health care, trauma counselling, and training and development of skills. But as Ms. Awori points out, "the women took over, declaring that they would no longer be caught in conflict situations as victims. We had to organize ourselves to support all these different groups of women getting involved in conflict resolution, a movement which took off like wildfire."
Ms. Awori laughs when asked how she has managed to combine the professional and the personal -- she is married to a Ugandan diplomat and has raised five children. "Every woman I know in Africa balances career responsibilities with those she has in the family and the community because of her gender. Like all women, we just have to do it all."
