At 6.00 a.m. on 19 February this year, the Director of the UN Development Programme (UNDP) Africa bureau, Ms. Thelma Awori, got a call from Eritrean and Ethiopian youths who wanted to meet in Nairobi to talk among themselves about peace. They wanted to know if UNDP Africa would support them.
"It made my day," Ms. Awori later told journalists. She was full of enthusiasm, not just for the proposal from the Eritrean and Ethiopian youths, but for UNDP's new approach to doing business, announced at a six-day meeting in Cotonou, Benin, just two weeks earlier. This new approach seeks to connect with the energies and aspirations of the African people and complement their abilities with UNDP resources.
Ms. Awori had just returned to New York from the meeting in Cotonou where 45 UNDP Resident Representatives in African countries reviewed Africa's development needs for the new millenium. The "Spirit of Cotonou," as UNDP's new direction in development is known, identifies not only new methods of work, but also new partnerships and priority areas in which the agency will intervene to specifically support Africa's own vision for "collective self-reliance towards peace and development."
-- Thelma Awori, UNDP Assistant Administrator
UNDP is one of the most widely implanted development agencies in Africa. With a network of 45 country offices, 10 regional programme offices and two sub-regional offices (in Addis Ababa and Harare), UNDP focuses on critical issues ranging from poverty, gender equality and the empowerment of women to good governance and private sector development. At the end of July 1998, approvals of UNDP Africa projects amounted to $764 mn out of total authorized programming of $976 mn for 1997-2000.
UNDP's renewed emphasis on empowering African people has become necessary
because past approaches have failed to eradicate poverty. Faced with the
fact that Africa is the only continent where poverty is predicted to increase
in the 21st century, Ms. Awori stresses that UNDP Africa must turn to those
who know development best and who will ultimately reap the rewards of its
success or pay the price of failure -- Africans themselves. 
At its meeting in Cotonou, UNDP identified "new kinds of development
partners we want to reach out to, listen to better, talk to more, learn
about more, who might help us to make our work much more effective,"
Ms. Awori explained. "We were trying to rekindle the spirit and the
vision that Africa has always had and make that the energy that is going
to move development in Africa."
UNDP will seek to forge new development partnerships with African youth, traditional leaders, churches and other religious groups. "We must integrate ourselves into the rich networks of existing grass-roots and community-based organizations," she emphasized.
"We speak about students as the future of Africa -- another resource that is left unexplored and unattended. We have agreed to work more closely with students and I am very pleased because I look forward to the energy that they will add to the equation.
"We have not worked with traditional leaders much before and I think that they are an avenue of great potential. Traditional rulers have told us how they have organized to end misery and to work for peace. All the traditional rulers of Africa will be meeting in August, to talk about how they can work for peace. And we will try to ensure that we are there."
Ms. Awori mentioned that UNDP is now looking at ways in which it can work with African religious leaders, to draw on the wealth of experience that they have acquired. "We can learn a lot from them," she added.
In keeping with the "Spirit of Cotonou," UNDP Africa wants to debunk the widespread belief that Africa is synonymous with poverty. "There is nothing further from the truth," she said. "Africa is one of the richest continents in the world. And the people of Africa are extremely resourceful, creative and talented. How is it that we have talented and resourceful people living with great wealth around them, but still their conditions of life are so poor? How do you deal with that major contradiction? The new goal for Africa has to be to use the continent's wealth to improve living conditions."
Africans are looking elsewhere for salvation, depending on massive amounts of assistance from abroad, Ms. Awori points out. "How is it that a continent that is so wealthy must look outside for its own development? This is another contradiction that we have to resolve as we move into the next millennium."
Facing up to the consequences of the declining trend of official development assistance (ODA) has been identified by UNDP as among Africa's most critical challenges -- one of four priority areas under the "Spirit of Cotonou."
Accounting for the lion's share
of external resource flows to Africa, ODA fell from $14.2 bn in 1992 to
$12.8 bn in 1996. ODA flows have fallen far short of the $30 bn a year that
some economists estimate is needed to reduce poverty in Africa. And although
the General Assembly set an ODA target of 0.7 per cent of GNP for donor
countries in 1996, these countries on average provided ODA equivalent to
just 0.25 per cent of GDP.
"Declining ODA is a reality and I think it is important that Africans wake up to that reality," Ms. Awori emphasized.
Another priority area is to capitalize on globalization's opportunities while responding to its challenges. In his September 1998 progress report on the implementation of the UN New Agenda for the Development of Africa in the 1990s, Secretary-General Kofi Annan noted that globalization offers major economic and social benefits, such as access to larger financial savings, new export markets and new technologies. But in the case of Africa, he pointed out that globalization, in the short term, has led to a significant marginalization of the continent, largely because African exports are mainly primary products, with little progress made in diversifying into manufactured goods. Africa's export revenues have grown only marginally, due to price uncertainties associated with commodities and the negative impact of higher interest rates on export financing. In addition, he said Africa faces the risk of further marginalization if it fails to attract more foreign capital.
The "Spirit of Cotonou" states that UNDP must support African countries by helping them to develop and implement adaptive strategies to minimize the adverse fallout from globalization and take advantage of the opportunities. Second, and concurrently, UNDP will advocate for a process which integrates sustainable human development concerns in all aspects of globalization.
Africa's debt burden is a third priority area for UNDP Africa. External public debt reached $223 bn in 1997 and the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative, established in 1996 to reduce the debt burden, has been largely ineffective.
UNDP Africa argues that the debt overhang requires a radical solution. It aims to forge partnerships with Oxfam, the Third World Network, Jubilee 2000, and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), to ensure a debt strategy that is "sustainable, comprehensive and pro-poor," Ms. Awori said. "HIPC is too little, too late, too slow. We believe that the debt should be cancelled completely. We would like to see Africa move into the new millenium with no debt."
Photo: UNDP / Radhika Chalasani
The fourth priority area for the "Spirit of Cotonou" is a redoubling of UNDP's commitment to serve as a voice for the poorest of the poor and other marginalized groups, including women and those afflicted with HIV/AIDS.
UNDP already has been doing a lot of work with women, for which it allocates 20 per cent of its funds. "It is important that women know this," she said. "I don't think they know this. Therefore, they don't take advantage of it. They don't go to negotiate with their governments to make sure that they get at least that minimum of 20 per cent."
UNDP is deeply concerned by the recent increase in conflicts in Africa. "If conflicts continue at this rate, we will not be able to stem the rising tide of poverty," Ms. Awori said. UNDP Africa spends 37 per cent of its funds on governance, holding good governance forums, supporting initiatives by Africans working for peace, funding law and judiciary reforms, strengthening parliaments and assisting in police training.
While training local police was at first considered beyond the scope of UNDP's activities, Ms. Awori explained that "if the police don't do their work properly, the courts don't do their work properly, leading to conflict in society. So we have to get involved."
UNDP also has spent $8 mn helping West Africans to implement a moratorium on small arms. "And this is an initiative from one of the African leaders," Ms. Awori said. "We do have some good leaders out there, I must tell you, and we need to support them."
