London — Millennium Lecture by K. Y. Amoako, Executive Secretary of Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), 10 Downing Street, London 17 December 2001

Prime Minister,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Intellectual curiosity is something that young people wear proudly but that national leaders usually grow out of, so I salute you, Prime Minister, for this series.

You and your Government are showing an openness to Africa, and that is deeply appreciated. Your call for solidarity with Africa at the Millennium Summit of the United Nations was clear and unambiguous. And in your response to the madness of terror, you took care to emphasise that solidarity with Africa must not cease. You encouraged Africa’s leaders as they created the New Partnership for Africa’s Development. Your Secretary of State for International Development, Clare Short, is greatly admired in Africa and globally for her leadership in development cooperation. Your Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, in a recent speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bank, put forth bold proposals that address both our needs and our aspirations.

For all this - and much more - we thank you for your leadership and statesmanship. Thank you, too, for your realisation that the insecurities on my continent can be transformed into mutual security and mutual gain. In Africa we have a proverb: "There are three friends in this world: courage, sense, and insight." Prime Minister, you are more than a friend, for you represent all three!

I should like to use this opportunity to outline Africa’s current course. I will dispute conventional wisdom about Africa’s future. And I will review a half dozen challenges to attaining a truly different Africa. I will then propose a new paradigm for development partnerships and finish by noting some upcoming international events that will allow us to move ahead together.

1. Trends in Africa towards 2015

The target year for most development goals is 2015. Let me begin by painting a numerical picture of Africa in 2015, if current trends continue. Sub-Saharan Africa, excluding South Africa, has a per capita income of $326, about one seventy-fifth of yours. That leaves four of every 10 Africans living in extreme poverty on less than $1 a day. Fourteen years ago, about 200 million Africans lived in such poverty. Today, 100 million more have joined them.

The good news is that, globally, the International Development Goals will be achieved by 2015. Progress in much of Asia and large parts of Latin America pretty much assure this. But the bad news is that Africa will not meet those goals. While the world cuts the proportion of people in poverty from 22% today to 11% in 2015, Africa will likely be stuck at around 37% - more than three times the global average.

The World Bank recently calculated the prospects of Sub-Saharan Africa meeting some of the other goals:

- Only half our countries are on track to have universal basic education by 2015.

- Only a few of our countries will have gender balance in our secondary schools by 2005.

- Only one country is on track to reduce infant mortality by two-thirds by 2015.

- Only six countries are on track to cut malnutrition in half by 2015. People often define our development crisis by the growing income gap between Africa and the world. I will be more fundamental. Our current life span of a mere 50 years will decline between now and 2015, because of growing poverty and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Your average life span, now more than 75 years, wil l grow longer. Equal opportunity must start with the equal opportunity to live.

2. A brighter future for Africa

A new generation of Africans finds these trends intolerable. The generation immediately after independence had almost unbridled optimism. Pent-up demand for economic goods and social services led to huge expansions of schools, health services and economies, and the governments to run them.

But the oil shocks of the 70s - followed by the debt overhang of the early 80s - took from us more than a decade of development. This was a time of stagnation, cynical leaders, and deteriorating standards of governance. The incurable optimists were cured.

Now, with the convergence of new progressive forces, of frustration with so little progress, of revulsion for power with selfish ends, there are mounting - even angry - demands for development that works for the people. The demands are for peace. For reducing poverty through growth and solid public services. For accountable, uncorrupted governments. The demands are also for a viable future for the unemployed and the young. And for inclusion in a progressive world. There is momentum on all these fronts - but far from enough.

Today, many of us are neither optimists nor pessimists. We are pragmatists. Self-critical, we have a growing feeling of urgency. Indeed, we see in Africa the gathering of determination, perhaps like the determination here in Europe in 1945. You met those challenges with leadership - true to your core values of fairness, social equality, and freedom from want.

3. Six challenges to that brighter future

I think there are six challenges to a brighter future in Africa. Let me start with governance.

The capable state is the prerequisite for development. Good governance is its own reward. It generates popular confidence in institutions and processes of government. It builds an enabling environment for the private sector to generate economic growth, unlocking the resources to overcome poverty and provide health and education, and is essential for making efficient use of scarce public resources. But good governance is also instrumental for effective partnerships with the international community.

Above all, good governance demands peace and security. We are not proud that Sub-Saharan Africa, compared with other regions, has the largest share of its people affected by conflict. Until these conflicts are resolved, and the conflict-stricken societies rebuilt, we cannot set Africa on the path to development.

Addressing these conflicts requires leadership and effective institutions. It is encouraging to see important efforts in this direction. Nelson Mandela’s peace efforts in Burundi underscore the importance of moral leadership, as does your committed engagement in Sierra Leone. The Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and subregional institutions are putting in place new mechanisms for better conflict management. Looking ahead, the UN Secretary-General, in a recent report to the General Assembly, made new proposals for the prevention of armed conflict and for post-conflict reconstruction - proposals that deserve the support of the international community.

Fortunately, the peaceful transfer of power is now the road more often taken in Africa, though even that road is bumpy, as we have seen several times this year. But we have also seen peer pressure to sustain peaceful transfers of power. Four years ago, the OAU took the landmark step of refusing to recognize forcible transfers of power. Last year, when African states ratified the Constitutive Act of the African Union, they declared any unconstitutional transfer of power to be off limits.

Growing forces of pluralism in Africa are also encouraging better governance. Civil society organisations, an independent media, human rights organisations - all are flourishing as much needed counterbalances.

The second challenge is to make our societies inclusive. The diversity of our ethnic groups is our greatest strength. Indeed, recent research shows ethnic diversity to be a source of stability.

We must also expand this inclusiveness to tap the potential of our women and youth. We have a long way to go. But there has been progress. For example, South Africa’s pioneering Women Budget Initiative is setting global standards for the inclusion of women in the economic and political realities that govern their lives.

To me, the unnoticed elephant in the room is youth. Demographic trends show that young people - our future - pose huge challenges for development. In some countries, such as Ethiopia where I live, more than 60% of the population is under 25. We must create far greater educational and employment opportunities for our youth. With formal employment as only a modest part of the solution, agricultural development and micro-enterprise are the real hopes. Whatever tools we use, we must know that unless our children have a viable future, our collective future will be bleak.

The third challenge is to reduce poverty, and that requires both economic growth and capably spent social budgets. We are pleased that the Poverty Reduction Strategy approach is now framing the development of most African countries. Incorporating the HIV/AIDS challenge into national development strategies is also essential to all of our development goals. Uganda has already made great strides in both by combining leadership, good planning, and action. And we at the Economic Commission for Africa - the ECA - are working hard with African leaders and donors to increase the quality and impact of this approach. The challenge here is to place the International Development Goals at the centre of national and donor strategies.

Fourth, Africa must be part of the global future of science-based progress. Our most basic economic task is to sustain food security, possible only by bringing science to agriculture.

Africa has not really benefited from the Green Revolution. So we may have to leapfrog that revolution - for ecological and economic reasons - and embrace the next agricultural revolution, the Biotechnology Revolution. We need a massive scaling up of poverty-focused public sector genetic research. We need strong and open debate on safeguards, to gain public support for the results of research. And because development in Africa has so far failed to embrace modern science to solve African problems, we need to establish- or re-establish - regional centres of excellence for science and technology research.

Fifth, we must have an information-rich economy. As you know, Africa runs the risk of being marginalised in the information revolution. That is why many African states are committed to the African Information Society Initiative, spearheaded by the ECA, to develop plans for major expansions of national information, communications, and technology systems.

Progress has been far faster than expected only a few years ago. Rwanda, a country benefiting from your Government’s long-term partnership commitment, now has an ICT commission headed by its President.

But few countries have given ICTs their due. Many still must deregulate information and communications. And most need to build capacities to manage the systems and content of an information-based economy.

The sixth challenge is to free up the tremendous creativity of the private sector, which can reduce poverty by building skills, creating jobs, and paying taxes. At stake are the vitality and future of our economies. Privatisation has moved smartly across the continent. Indeed, in some African countries private telecommunications companies are now running circles around their public counterparts.

Fueling the private sector in Africa is the growth of our security markets, enabling some fairly large equity funds to operate. And we certainly have room for the significant expansion of intermediary financing mechanisms targeted at small and medium-size enterprises.

The challenge is to continue to put in place the policy framework to enable the private sector to flourish - including legislative and regulatory provisions and safeguards for property rights.

Only by meeting these six challenges can Africa break out of its trend lines, meet the International Development Goals, and achieve what pragmatic people in Africa now demand. The challenges are not new. What is new is that we have a better understanding of the depth of the issues, grounded in a thorough knowledge base of country experience. Now we must focus our efforts and perform much better. And as the poorest area in the world, we need productive international partnerships.

4. A new paradigm for development cooperation

Over the past few years, some exciting partnership concepts have been proposed by a number of us in Africa. Together, they imply a paradigm shift in Africa’s relations with its international development partners. They emerge from different processes - from the new thinking by many of Africa’s leaders, from the ideas of civil society organisations, from our work at the ECA. And they are crystallized in the New Partnership for Africa’s Development.

Experience shows that Africans must lead Africa out of poverty, and that the most effective policies and programmes are those based on domestic processes of consultation and decisionmaking. That requires good governance: a capable state with effective institutions, sound economic management, and the participation of all sectors of society.

At the heart of our new paradigm is a transformed development partnership. We seek a joint commitment to commonly agreed development goals, and mutual accountability in progress towards those goals. This moves us away from the past model of donor-imposed conditionalities - and towards self-monitoring and peer review among Africans.

Another part of this new paradigm is having long-term predictable partnerships underpinned by guaranteed long-term resource flows to countries that have a clear commitment to these shared goals - flows that are timely, stable, and high in quality. The best quality assistance is harmonized, predictable, and integrated within national poverty reduction strategies, with low transaction costs.

This enhanced partnership entails supporting countries that will be the forerunners of Africa’s transition from high aid dependency to a more robust development path led by the private sector. We must let such countries become beacons of excellence, models for their neighbours to emulate, and engines of regional economic growth.

But we cannot ignore those countries not doing so well. Different treatment is required for those countries struggling to emerge from past mismanagement. We must move them steadily towards the point where they can benefit from the new enhanced partnership. Other countries are recovering from conflict, and we need to identify and implement means of ensuring the success of their post-conflict reconstruction plans.

I also commend giving more consideration to the breadth of partnership. Too often donors have based their relationships on a charismatic leader. But I think that long-lasting partnerships require a broader base, involving many constituencies. We have a joint interest in building pluralism as a cornerstone of stability, accountability, and more balanced growth. To do this requires broader relationships between Africa and its development partners with strong ties - state-to-state, business-to-business, civil society-to-civil society, and academy-to-academy. These broader relationships will foster interpersonal dignity and the stability of mutual interest.

Partnerships that respond to our needs will go beyond money transfers to really focus on helping us build sustainable human capacities and institutions. Yes, capacities are growing in many countries in Africa. But more systematic attention is needed to make capacity-building more productive, strengthening parliaments, judiciaries, and systems of public finance.

If broader relationships and capacity building are needed for countries, they are also needed for the region. We know from Latin America’s example that integration can be fostered very effectively by a strong regional development bank and a strong regional economic commission.

Yet, some donors have trouble helping us solve regional and subregional problems. They have difficulty assisting supra-national organisations and cross-border infrastructure because they justify and score their funds on a national basis. I hope that future partnerships will transcend this problem.

A final dimension of improving relationships with Africa is to stress key countries with political and economic importance across Africa. I want to focus on three: Nigeria, Congo and South Africa.

Threatening stability in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, are a fledgling democracy, fragile institutions, and dangerous social fractures. Measures to help stabilize Nigeria and deal with its onerous debt problem deserve urgent attention - as preconditions for broad-based poverty reduction in that country, and for regional stability.

Peace in the Congo is also critical. Restoring the Congo to the Congo will promote the stability of a huge swath of Africa.

And South Africa, the continent’s largest economy by far, with the potential to power growth throughout much of the continent, faces major problems of unemployment and rampant HIV/AIDS. What is most urgent in South Africa is rapidly broadening the reach of social and economic development.

Prime Minister,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

We need our international development partners to buy into this model. There are strong moral reasons to do so, but there are also compelling reasons of common interest.

I wholeheartedly agree with the remarks by Mary Robinson, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, in a speech to mark International Human Rights Day in Addis Ababa last week. Saying that development and the fulfilment of human rights go hand in hand, she called for ethical globalization. Extreme poverty, she said, is the gravest violation of human rights.

For us in Africa, the human rights approach to development is reinforced by the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, which has good governance and enhanced international partnerships as its cornerstones. Good governance means respecting and fulfilling the rights of citizens. For the international partnerships, we envisage a compact in which African governments and their development partners jointly meet their obligations to the world’s poorest citizens.

We in Africa are grateful that you, Prime Minister, kept Africa firmly on the international agenda in the aftermath of September 11, when the new global agenda could so easily have focused solely on the international coalition’s war on terrorism. Poverty and conflict breed frustration and alienation, the seeds of terrorism. Our quest for stability and growth in Africa can thus enhance international peace and security.

5. Advancing the partnership

The upcoming international calendar provides opportunities to bring the international community along in meeting the challenges I have mentioned. The first opportunity is to see that there is quick follow-up to the trade meeting in Doha - to maintain the pro-development momentum you helped establish there.

There is a need for real capacity-building to prepare most of Africa to engage in trade and to be productive in trade negotiations.

The issues are complex, and there are few technical studies on the potential impact of new obligations for our economies. That is why Africa and other developing countries expressed strong reservations at Doha about launching a new round of multilateral trade negotiations that will encompass these new and complex issues. Comprehensive impact studies are essential if we are to commit to agreements, which in the words of Tanzania's Trade Minister Mr. Idda Simba, are "matters of life and death for us." It is gratifying to see that the British Government, through your Department for International Development, has provided some funds for capacity-building in these key technical areas.

There is also a critical need to further open OECD markets to African products, particularly in agriculture. A decline of 40% in Europe’s agricultural subsidies by 2005 would produce annual gains of $15 billion for developing countries and $55 billion for Europe’s consumers. A similar adjustment in fisheries policies would be a major boon to both Africa and Europe.

The second opportunity is the UN’s Financing for Development Conference in Monterey next March. As Chancellor Brown’s speech emphasised last month to the New York Federal Reserve, major resource mobilisation is essential. At the core of this is greater domestic resource mobilisation, by far the largest source of development finance, through better domestic policy environments, the sine qua non for greater external finance.

We know the levels of resources needed to make the difference in reducing poverty. But most major donors have failed to meet the goal of 0.7% of GNP for aid. And the overall level is now just 0.22%, the lowest since the Marshall Plan of the 1940s. Gordon Brown’s appeal for doubling aid - from 50 billion dollars to 100 billion dollars - is well justified, towards meeting the target of 0.7% GNP. I hope that we can accelerate this with clear benchmarks for progress in the next five years.

There is also a need for the Financing for Development Conference to address the financing problems of Africa’s most indebted countries. If we want to make a bigger dent in Africa’s debt, we need to put our minds together to think "out of the box." Let me take a first step out of that box:

- For countries emerging from conflict or past misrule, we should perhaps consider a programme that would provide debt relief on achievable terms for three years.

- Perhaps we could find a way to marry debt relief and funding African peacekeeping.

- Perhaps we could allow for a moratorium of one or two years for countries vulnerable to commodity price fluctuations when their income falls below a certain level.

- Perhaps we could provide a pot of gold at the end of the HIPC rainbow by providing expanded relief - or forgiveness - at the end of five years of good performance.

- Perhaps a certain percentage of debt payments could be redirected to the fight against HIV/AIDS.

I present these ideas to make the point that one of the most effective tools against any challenge is a willingness to defy convention and think creatively. As we say in Africa: "There are forty kinds of lunacy, but only one kind of common sense." Not all of my ideas may make much sense but they are a start. Let’s work collectively to come up with the right ones!

The third big opportunity will be the next meeting of the G-8 in Canada. With a focus on Africa, the G-8 is expected to respond to the New Partnership for Africa’s Development. The response could usefully buttress three desirable ends: achieving the International Development Goals, accelerating the process of regionalisation, and fostering peace and reconstruction. There is also an opportunity for the G-8 to move from segmented discussions of Africa’s development to a more holistic response. That might include periodic leadership dialogues between the G-8 and Africa.

What is needed is to come up with something concrete by the end of next year—with specific, time-bound deliverables. We very much hope that the G-8 can sharply reverse the slide in aid to Africa. Collectively, the G-8’s record in development assistance to Africa in the past decade has not been impressive. Overall aid to Africa has declined from $19 billion a year at the beginning of the 90s to $12 billion now, a per capita drop of 40%. In the same period, our share of global aid has dropped from 37% to 27%—this, when the quality of Africa’s development has improved. Shouldn’t better performance be better recognised?

A new champion for aid to Africa is needed, and I believe that he can be found in this room! I hope that we in Africa have opportunities to work with this Government to make the next G-8 meeting a major success.

The fourth event on the calendar is the Johannesburg Summit on Sustainable Development - scheduled (significantly) to end on September 11, 2002. As a follow-up to the Rio Earth Summit 10 years before, the event should be a chance to arrive at more comprehensive commitments across many of our common concerns to make a more secure world. The conference may well represent a shift from Rio’s more purely environmental focus to issues of sustainability. There should be follow-up mechanisms to add financing and accountability for implementing the Rio commitments. There should also be direction on a sustained course for reaching the International Development Goals.

All this requires international cooperation on a large scale. Consider the links between health and sustainable development. In a few days, Gro Harlem Bruntdtland’s Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, led by Jeffrey Sachs, will release its final report here in London. I have been privileged to serve on that Commission.

The report will emphasize strong connections between investing in health and achieving sustainable development. It recommends quantum increases in health investments, and for low-income Sub-Saharan Africa the increases would be far higher than for any other region. Dramatic expansions of health services in Africa will require strong partnerships if they are to be achieved. Prime Minister,

I have covered a lot of ground, identifying what I believe to be the key challenges for Africa - and the key elements of a new development partnership for Africa. In summing up, I should like to spotlight five areas where we need to collectively come up with time-bound deliverables and generate momentum for sustained progress. As we say in Africa, "If you know the beginning well, the end will not trouble you."

- First, we must promote good governance in both the political and economic spheres. This includes strengthening financial management, building the capacities of parliaments and judiciaries, and rooting out corruption.

- Next, we must address our regional peace and security needs. This requires coordinated action by the United Nations, OAU, and subregional organisations, backed by well-implemented programmes for post-conflict rehabilitation.

- Third is to invest in human capital at all levels - from basic literacy upwards. We must support the application of ICTs to health and development. We must strengthen regional centres of excellence in science and technology. And we must tackle the diseases of poverty, especially HIV/AIDS.

- Fourth, we must target farmers. We need to support agriculture with more effective institutions for micro-finance and rural infrastructure. And let’s not forget that most farming in Africa is done by women.

- Last and most critical, we must jointly secure adequate financing for development by tackling what has been called the "new trinity of debt, aid, and trade." We in Africa must create an enabling environment for the private sector, while developed countries must do their part in opening up market access and eliminating subsidies. We must also assess each country’s financing requirements in the context of what is needed to achieve the International Development Goals.

Prime Minister, I have been candid about Africa’s challenges and promises. We live in a tough neighbourhood, and the struggle may be long. But I want to close by underscoring what is absolutely our biggest asset and our biggest hope. It is the human spirit, which, when given a chance, will fulfil Africa’s promise.

With your leadership in making globalisation work for the poor - and with your Government’s vision of a world in which the good of each depends upon the good of all - we will achieve a brighter future for Africa.

From this house to God’s ears.

Thank you.