William Mwanza, tralac Researcher, discusses Africa’s position on the Post-2015 Development Agenda

The 22nd Summit of African Union Heads of State and Government was held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, from 21 to 31 January, 2014. Among some important decisions of the Summit was the adoption of the Common African Position (CAP) on the Post-2015 development agenda. This common position is the culmination of a series of national, regional and continental consultations that were held by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, African Union Commission, African Development Bank, and United Nations Development Programme. These consultations, which involved various stakeholders from 53 African countries, included regional and sub-regional consultations held between 2011 and 2013 in Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, and Tunisia, and an online survey that commenced in 2011.

Within the frame of these consultations, there have been some emerging perspectives on the current Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and what the post-2015 agenda should include. With regard to the former, some of the positives that have been noted with the MDGs in their current form include that:

• By focusing attention on the poor, they have successfully galvanised widespread international support and led to significant contributions to socioeconomic development in different countries globally;

• Although a direct cause-and-effect relationship has not been established, they are seen to have contributed to an improvement and increase in the targeted flow of development assistance and investment; and

• They have ensured a commitment to results-based development and so catalysed monitoring programmes through data collection and analysis.

There have also been challenges that have been noted with the current MDGs, including inter alia that:

• They have sometimes been misinterpreted as universal targets to be attained by all countries without due regard to variations in initial conditions and capacities of countries;

• They have been limited in scope with a disproportionate focus on the social sector;

• They have not taken into account synergies between different sectors;

• They have promoted dependency due to the hitherto overemphasis on donor funding; and

• The emphasis on national aggregates has led to limited attention to spatial, income and group inequalities in the access to services.

These views have resulted in the Common African Position, which has set out the following as development outcomes that should form an integral part of the post-2015 agenda:

• Sustainable economic transformation and inclusive growth;

• Innovation, technology transfer and Research and Development (R&D);

• Human Development; and

• Financing and partnerships.

Development enablers have also been identified as prerequisites, some of which include peace and security, good political and economic governance, strengthened institutional capacity, promotion of the rule of law and respect for human rights, gender equality, participatory processes with cultural sensitivity, domestic financing (with the recognised role of the private sector in public-private partnerships) and regional integration.

Hence the CAP builds on the previous MDGs by retaining them under the proposed ‘Human Development’ outcome and widening the scope of the development agenda to include the three other important areas.

As adopted, the CAP is going to form Africa’s input into efforts towards the consolidation of the global post-2015 agenda which are set to continue this year. Importantly, it plays the additional role of signalling a renewed consensus on where the continent’s development efforts should focus in the short to medium term.

Particularly noteworthy is the renewed emphasis on structural economic transformation as a priority means for effectively attaining higher levels of development. Efforts towards such transformation are not new to the continent. Soon after attaining independence in the 1960s countries did embark on efforts to build their productive structure away from an over-reliance on primary products through, for example, the development of manufacturing industries. In the 1980s structural transformation was initially a priority through the structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) albeit with limited effect in altering different countries productive structures. From the mid-1990s, the focus of development policy turned towards emphasising social sectors, through poverty reduction strategy papers, which can be seen to have filtered into the thinking behind the current MDGs. Since the 2000s however, there has also been an increasing recognition of the importance of home-grown solutions, with national growth and development plans developed as such. With the current return of structural economic transformation as a priority, thinking around development can be seen to have come full circle, and with slow results in its attainment in most African countries over the decades, a lack of structural economic transformation can be seen as arguably the most important root cause of their underdevelopment. With its current emphasis on sustainable development and inclusive growth, this re-focus on structural economic transformation represents a renewed opportunity for addressing such underdevelopment, and by prospectively being a priority area in the post-2015 global agenda would potentially galvanise efforts in its more effective attainment.

As recognised in the CAP, such efforts, particularly in financing the structural transformation agenda, will largely have to be driven by domestic resources and through various partnerships, such as with the private sector. Because of its inherent difficulty, one would envisage the early post-2015 era to be characterised by renewed consideration and formulation of strategies on how structural economic transformation can effectively be attained in the different countries given past and emerging circumstances. A holistic frame has been agreed upon in the CAP, with linkages between the four outcomes that can be tailored in different countries.

This endeavour may not be restricted to the national level only though. As was noted, regional integration has been identified as one of the important enablers for the attainment of structural economic transformation and its three related outcomes. As it stands, various countries are implementing regional integration initiatives that would assist in the attainment of the envisaged outcomes and will continue formulating and implementing various projects along the way. Integrating these into post-2015 national strategies would effectively help in ensuring that the regional integration agenda and the post-2015 agenda are not separate but are rather a unified process. At the regional and continental level, it could also mean integrating the post-2015 agenda into existing and new agreements and initiatives, thereby ensuring that the envisaged outcomes are an integral part of the regional integration process. Again, some of the desired outcomes are already part of the process in the different regions. Various aspects such as the design of regional strategies and institutional measures that will be required to ensure effective harmonisation of the two agendas will continue to become clearer as the CAP is further taken forward, and as the post-2015 global agenda is further consolidated.

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Sources:

African Union. (2014). Decision on the Common African Position on the Post-2015 Development Agenda – Doc. Assembly/AU/9(XXII). [Online]. Available at: http://au.int/en/sites/default/files/Assembly%20AU%20Dec%20490-516%20(XXII)%20_E.pdf

UNECA, AUC, AfDB and UNDP. (2012). MDG Report 2012: Assessing Progress in Africa toward the Millennium Development Goals – Emerging Perspectives from Africa on the post-2015 development agenda. [Online]. Available at: http://www.afdb.org/fileadmin/uploads/afdb/Documents/Publications/MDG%20Report%202012%20-%20Full%20Report.pdf

UNECA, AUC, AfDB and UNDP. (2013). Outcome Document of the Regional Consultations on the Post-2015 Development Agenda. [Online]. Available at: http://www.regionalcommissions.org/africa2015.pdf