NEPAD AT TEN: THE JOURNEY SO FAR

By Abdulsemiu Babalola

 

The New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) is celebrating ten years of its existence. The occasion provides an opportunity for reflection on the past, present and project into the future of this great Africa initiative.

Worried by the dismal outcome of their various efforts at development, African leaders came up with the idea of a home-grown development agenda. In July 2001 during the African Union Summit in Lusaka, Zambia, the leaders adopted NEPAD as the strategy for turning around the fortune of the close to one billion people of the continent.

NEPAD was designed as a framework for promoting Africa’s growth and development based on the recognition that in the current global setting, the continent’s development is vital to the realization of the material interest of not only Africans but also of the rest of the world.

Some of the priorities of NEPAD include peace, security, democracy and good governance. Others are economic and corporate governance, regional cooperation and integration, human capital development, agriculture, environment, creating awareness about climate change, education, health and capacity building. NEPAD is also concerned with the development of information communication and technology, energy, science, transport and water across Africa.

As a home grown development programme that rests upon new relationships, NEPAD has developed an appropriate constructive partnership between Africa and the international community particularly G-8 industrialized nations.

The engagement with the group is very strategic and instructive, given Africa’s historical, socio-economic relations with their colonial past. G-8 constitutes the continent’s main trading, credit and development partners.
At inception of NEPAD, only ten countries signed into the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM). Ten years later thirty of the fifty four countries have signed up.

APRM is a self-monitoring mechanism mutually agreed to and voluntarily adopted by the member states of the AU to promote and re-enforce high standards of governance.

Its mandate is to ensure that the policies and practices of participating countries conform to the agreed values in the four focus areas including, democracy and political governance, economic governance, corporate governance and socio-economic development.

As part of the APRM, there are periodic reviews of the participating countries to assess progress being made towards achieving the mutually agreed goals. Between 2006 and January 2011, fourteen member countries including Nigeria have been peer reviewed, this indeed is a remarkable achievement.

Also in 2003, the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) was set up as part of NEPAD. The main goal of CAADP is to revitalize African agriculture for economic growth. Through CAADP some African countries have raised their agricultural productivity by six percent per year.

It is also gratifying to note that Africa’s agrarian economies have been on the upswing for the past decade, with GDP growing by six percent on the average per year and agriculture sector by four to five percent each year.

Similarly, the level of per capita food production in Africa has increased steadily. Average poverty levels in Africa which rose annually in the 1980s and 1990s, have actually dropped by about six percentage points over the last ten years. And the share of undernourished people has declined from 36 percent in the mid 1990s to 30 percent more recently.

Another remarkable feat of NEPAD is the recent publication of the 2010 African Innovation Outlook. For the first time in the continent’s history, the document was formally launched in May, 2011 at the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) Conference Centre, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

The document is a survey which provides useful insights about science, technology and innovation activities in African countries. Twenty three countries participated in the research & development and the innovation survey conducted by the African Science and Technology Initiative Innovation (ASTII).

In spite of these accomplishments, NEPAD is facing some daunting challenges which have been militating against the realization of its objectives.

Critics say the fact that the key initiators of the concept did not seem to have adopted a “bottom up”, approach by first propagating and popularizing the idea in their respective countries before adoption, is affecting the general acceptability of the programme.

Also, NEPAD as a framework for the economic development of the continent remains vague and hazy to a majority of the people. This is why to date, not a good percentage of the populace understands what the initiative stands for. Many still see it as too elitist and most visible among government officials.

Though Africa has the second largest population after Asia, it is only contributing one percent of the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and less than three percent of the International Trade. In the Maputo declaration some years ago, African leaders agreed to devote ten percent of their national budget to agriculture. Close to ten years after, only eight out of the then 53 countries in Africa have done so.

While democracy is taking roots in many countries in Africa, its dividends are still a mirage. Half of the population still lives on less than one US dollars per day. Africa still has the highest infant and maternal mortality rate in the world. Not all the populations have access to safe drinking water, sanitation and good shelter. Illiteracy level is still high, compare to other continents.

Despite these, kudos must be given to the founders and promoters of NEPAD for the invaluable contributions the initiative has been able to make to the efforts to elevate the status of the African people.

Although NEPAD may not have been able to deliver one hundred percent on its development agenda, a lot of progress has been made in the first decade of its existence. A lot of work needs to be done not only to consolidate on the grounds covered so far but to also break new grounds and bring the African people closer to good life.

Efforts must be doubled in addressing the issue of peace and security across the continent. This is because without peace no development can take place.

 

Broadcast on July 30, 2011

 

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