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Southern Africa: Poverty Reduction Depends On Economic Growth - ADB
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
20 April 2008
Posted to the web 21 April 2008
Paul Favet
Port Louis
Southern African countries can eliminate poverty but only if their economies "can grow sustainably over several years", declared the President of the African Development Bank (ADB), Donald Kaberuka, on Sunday.
Kaberuka was giving the keynote address to the summit of heads of state and government of SADC (Southern African Development Community), held in the Mauritian capital of Port Louis to discuss issues of poverty and development.
Kaberuka called for continuing the orthodox business-friendly approach to growth. "It is imperative to steadily reduce the costs and the risks of doing business, both political and economic", he said, "while expanding the size and diversity of our markets".
He admitted that economic growth on its own was not enough to eliminate poverty, "but it remains the essential condition, provided that it is broad based and non-exclusive".
Growth would be more inclusive, he added, "if we give greater attention to education, attend to the needs of our small farmers and small businesses, especially those owned by women, and growth will be more broad-based if we widen access to financial services".
Kaberuka said that, over the past six years, Africa "has got back on the growth path" - but he admitted the recent growth "is to a large extent commodity driven and there is not, as yet, evidence of change in the economic structure".
The picture was highly uneven. He said that six sub-Saharan African countries had tripled their per capita income in the past three decades, but nine had regressed to 1960 levels. The majority "have witnessed a net improvement but not yet enough to make a dent on poverty".
For this year, he expected the average African economic growth rate to be around 6.4 percent. This falls short of the seven per cent the continent needs if it is to attain the UN's Millennium Development Goals by the cut-off date of 2015, but it is at least outpacing population growth.
"Provided we can sustain the pace over time, real per capita incomes will be positively impacted and poverty will steadily decline, if we succeed in broadening the pattern of growth and making it inclusive", Kaberuka argued.
He claimed that, in economics, "the tortoise always beats the hare" - in other words steady, continuous progress "is much preferable to spurts of fast growth, followed by reversal and decline, either because of changes in policies or changes in the external environment".
He warned that Africa "has experienced far too many cases of excellent, promising performers who abruptly changed direction, resulting in significant damage and loss of production, undermining confidence and dramatically increasing poverty".
An obvious example of this syndrome is Zimbabwe - but Kaberuka was delicate enough to avoid naming any names.
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Kaberuka did not believe that the markets will mysteriously produce prosperity all on their own. Instead "a pro-active state is very much needed".
This was not a rebirth of centrally planned economies. "I am not referring to old style state interventions, which suffocated the economy", he said. "I am referring here to a state which enables businesses and farmers to prosper by responding to opportunities in the world market".
He thought it crucial "to strengthen this aspect of state function, while of course continuing to roll back its predatory role". Skepticism about the state, given the experiences of the past, was understandable "but what is called for now is qualitatively different - a capable, developmental state, which enables rather than disables, is what we are looking for".
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| 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. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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