Paul Fauvet
18 April 2008
Port Louis — The Deputy Prime Minister of Mauritius, Rama Sithanen, on Friday painted a bleak picture of the current levels of poverty in the SADC (Southern African Development Community Region), and warned that to date foreign aid flows to the region are "woefully inadequate".
Opening the SADC Consultative Conference on Poverty and Development in the Mauritian capital of Port Louis, Sithanen pointed out that "with an average economic growth rate of three per cent over the past decades our chances of breaking the cycle of poverty are simply very low".
Forty five per cent of the citizens of SADC are living "in abject poverty" - but that average hid gross disparities among the members states. The figure ranges from less than one per cent (in Mauritius itself) to over 60 per cent.
Furthermore, Sithanen added, "the figures do not tell us that, besides income poverty, millions of our poor people have to put up with diseases, with noxious climatic conditions and other calamities, millions of children are out of education and may never get a fair start in life".
Now the region faced new menaces, in the shape of soaring food and fuel prices. Sithanen noted that "for every two to 2.4 per cent increase in food prices, it is estimated that the number of people going hungry in developing countries will increase by one percent". This could set back the task of halving poverty - the first of the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) - by seven years.
SADC also faced new threats from climate change. "Farmers are no longer certain when the rains will come and when to plant", said Sithanen. "From climate change to food shortages to poverty, the linkages are short and direct".
Sithanen insisted that "the only sustainable way to combat poverty is to secure higher economic growth". The challenges and uncertainties of oil and food prices and climate change "only reinforce the conviction that growth followed by improvement in the distribution of wealth and income should be seated at the very centre of our fight against poverty".
Sithanen noted that SADC members are still failing to trade among themselves (despite pledges of regional integration, and the SADC free trade area that took effect on 1 January). Increased trade (both within SADC, and with the rest of the world), he said depended on lowering tariff and non-tariff barriers, and on "more trade facilitation measures and infrastructure, in particular transport infrastructure".
New investment, he added, will only be attracted "by bringing about significant improvement in the ease of doing business, in opening our countries and the region to foreign investment, capital, expertise, talents and ideas".
However, Mauritius knew from its own experience that the costs of economic reforms are very high, and could not be borne "without substantial support from abroad".
The sums involved are very large indeed. Sithanen warned that "to bring infrastructure in SADC to the level necessary to increase trade, investment and growth on a sustainable basis would require an annual investment of eight billion US dollars until 2015". There is no sign of such investment - total foreign aid to SADC over the 2001-2005 period was just five billion dollars, for infrastructure and all other needs.
"Let me stress that such aid inflows are woefully inadequate", said Sithanen. If the funding gap is not overcome, "SADC risks losing the recent impetus to a higher growth rate of six per cent or more. It will become extremely difficult for many countries to spend on education, training, primary health care, empowerment and decent dwellings for al, let alone invest in infrastructure and liberalise trade".
It was thus crucial he added, "to appeal to development partners for predictable, additional and dedicated financing".
The path ahead would also require "good implementation capacity" from SADC, which should set up "effective monitoring mechanisms". Sithanen stressed that "statistics on poverty in SADC are notoriously murky, and make it difficult to track our progress".
SADC Executive Secretary Tomas Salomao told the opening session "we need to be pro-poor in our strategies and start our interventions where the poor are located. We know they are in he informal sector, they run small business or work for them, they are small farmers or supplement their livelihood as farm workers, they majority are young people, they are women".
The poor also "live in rural areas or peri-urban communities which are the least developed parts of our countries, with the worst infrastructure and services".
A further challenge, Salomao said, was that 35 per cent of the world's HIV-positive people live in the SADC region, which contains the eight countries with the highest HIV prevalence rates in the world.
Nonetheless, since the conference brings together governments, foreign donors, and representatives of private business and of civil society, Salomao was optimistic "that today we not only speak as a conference, but are echoing the many voices from across the region who entrust us with their hopes and aspirations to see a poverty-free SADC.
He believed the conference "will contribute to unlocking the potential that we know this region holds".
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