|
|
Southern Africa: SADC Poverty Conference Runs Into Snags
 |
 |
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
20 April 2008
Posted to the web 20 April 2008
Port Louis, Mauritius
The Southern African Development Community (SADC) Consultative Conference on development and poverty, under way in the Mauritian capital of Port Louis, ran into snags on Saturday afternoon, with a four hour delay in producing the expected final communique and press briefing.
This conference is at ministerial level, and precedes the gathering of SADC heads of state and government scheduled for Sunday.
Explaining the delay to reporters, the SADC Executive Secretary, Tomas Salomao, claimed it was due to the change in format of this year's consultative conference. At the last such conference, held in Windhoek in 2006, there were just two groups present - SADC governments, and foreign donors (now referred to as "international cooperating partners").
But this time representatives of private business and of SADC civil society are also attending the conference, with speaking rights, and so, according to Salomao, "the process of preparing the joint communiqué is more complex".
Views of all four groups - government, donors, civil society and business - had to be "accommodated" in the communiqué, he said. This meant, not only lengthy discussion in plenary session, but also bilateral consultations with the various interest groups.
Salomao denied that the stumbling block was differences over the approach towards the crisis in Zimbabwe. He believed that the key stumbling block by early evening was over whether the final statement should refer to the content of the thematic working groups into which the conference had broken on Friday afternoon.
There had been working groups on trade, infrastructure, agriculture, gender, skills development and HIV/AIDS. The SADC governments, Salomao said, want the conclusions from these working groups included as part of the communiqué.
The donors, however, want to leave them out. Their view, Salomao summarized, was "that we didn't have enough time in the thematic groups to go further with our discussions, and so they shouldn't form part of the communiqué".
|
"The problem is how to recast the communiqué so as to take into account the positions both of the member states and of the cooperating partners", he aid.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Copyright © 2008 Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Make allAfrica.com your home page | RSS Feed | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top | Site Guide | Who We Are | Advertising | Search | Subscribe | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Questions or Comments? Contact us. Read our Privacy Statement. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
