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Southern Africa: Growth 'Must Reach the Poor And Vulnerable'
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
PRESS RELEASE
20 April 2008
Posted to the web 21 April 2008
Paul Fauvet
Port Louis
Economic growth in the SADC (Southern African Development Community) region must be "inclusive", so that it "reaches the poor and the vulnerable", declared the Prime Minister of Mauritius, Navichandar Ramgoolam, on Sunday.
Welcoming fellow heads of state and government to the SADC summit on poverty and development in the Mauritian capital, Port Louis, Ramgoolam warned that "a rising economic tide does not reach all boats".
Instead of leaving everything up to the market, the SADC leaders should seize the opportunity "to bring the poor into the loop of mainstream development". Thanks largely to the revolution in communication and information technologies, there were now "enormous opportunities for trade, investment and technology transfer on a scale that Africa has rarely experienced".
"Along with policies to foster growth, we must take parallel actions to ensure that poor people can access productive resources and be gainfully employed", Ramgoolam stressed. "We must invest in human resources to build a flexible and efficient workforce".
As for finance, he noted that in some SADC countries "the majority of the population does not have access to a bank account". He urged member states to adopt "more inclusive financial systems".
Ramgoolam also made a brief call for improved governance and the "deepening" of democratic institutions, since "good governance is essential for inclusive growth and poverty alleviation".
Turning to the donors, Ramgoolam declared "it is no time for our development partners to use aid fatigue as an argument to slow down their efforts". Instead, if Africa was "to maximize the dynamics of change in favour of the poor, it is essential that our development partners further strengthen their focus on pro-poor/inclusive growth".
He wanted to see donors "channel more resources for direct support to the poor, while at the same time promoting trade, regional integration, higher flows of direct investment, and more technology transfers".
Ramgoolam noted that, on almost any statistical basis, poverty in the SADC region is worse than the global average. "There are countries in SADC where more than 80 per cent of the population lives in poverty", he said. "On average, 40 per cent of SADC's population lives on less than one US dollar a day, and 60 per cent on less than two dollars a day".
The problem of fighting poverty, he added, were made worse by spiraling oil prices, climate change, and the linked rise in food prices. Historically, countries had made the transition from poverty to prosperity by an enormous increase in the use of fossil fuels - a route which may be closed to SADC.
"Can we find the appropriate policy space within which we can combat poverty while adopting a precautionary environmental policy?", Ramgoolam asked. "As policy makers who have to ensure decent livelihoods for our people today as well as for future generations, and so we can hardly afford to brush aside the intersection between the poverty crisis and the climate crisis".
He was convinced that SADC could rise to the challenge and take major strides towards poverty reduction. "The task is certainly immense, but so is our responsibility to the millions who live in absolute poverty in our countries".
If SADC failed to meet the first of the Millennium Development Goals - reducing extreme poverty by half by 2015 - then "then we would also fail the millions of our citizens who are desperately seeking a way to rejoin the mainstream of society".
The current chairperson of SADC, Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa, told the summit to "clearly prioritise the actions we shall agree to implement. It is not useful to come up with too many resolutions which we know will not be implemented".
"We need to go beyond exchanging experiences about what is happening in our individual countries", he said. "We should also avoid preparing a regional plan by merely amalgamating our individual country poverty reduction plans".
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Mwanawasa called for "a focus on those steps and action that are necessary at regional level to help us fight poverty. We must, at regional level, prioritise implementation of those actions which require us to act in unison with the other members in order to put a dent in poverty. This is the only way in which we can render a regional approach to poverty reduction a meaningful exercise".
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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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