The Africa We Want – A Shared Strategic Framework for Inclusive Growth and Sustainable Development

Over the past 50 years (1963-2013) Africa focused her collective on the decolonization, the struggle against apartheid and attainment of political independence for the continent. On the occasion of the golden jubilee (May 2013) of the Organization of African Unity (OAU)/African Union (AU) which spearheaded the decolonization process, the continent re-dedicated herself to the attainment of the Pan African Vision of An integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa, driven by its own citizens, representing a dynamic force in the international arena.

To achieve this vision, the Golden Jubilee Summit of the Union came up with a solemn declaration in eight areas spanning: social and economic development; integration, democratic governance and peace and security amongst others as the planks of the vision.

In order to make the solemn declaration a reality and within the context of the AU Vision, the Golden Jubilee Summit of the Union directed the African Union Commission (AUC), supported by the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) Planning and Coordinating Agency (NPCA), the African Development Bank (AfDB) and the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), to prepare a continental 50-year agenda through a people-driven process outlining the Africa We Want, namely Agenda 2063.

The Seven Aspirations

• Aspiration 1: A prosperous Africa based on inclusive growth and sustainable development.

• Aspiration 2: An integrated continent; politically united and based on the ideals of PanAfricanism and the vision of Africa’s Renaissance.

• Aspiration 3: An Africa of good governance, democracy, respect for human rights, justice and the rule of law.

• Aspiration 4: A peaceful and secure Africa.

• Aspiration 5: An Africa with a strong cultural identity, common heritage, shared values and ethics.

• Aspiration 6: An Africa, whose development is people-driven, relying on the potential of African people, especially its women and youth, and caring for children.

• Aspiration 7: Africa as a strong, united, resilient and influential global player and partner.

After the adoption of the Agenda 2063 Framework Document by the Summit in January 2015 as the basis for Africa’s long term socio-economic and integrative transformation, it directed the AUC to prepare the First Ten Year Implementation Plan of Agenda 2063 (2013-2023). This plan, the first in a series of five ten year plans over the fifty year horizon was adopted by the Summit in June 2015 as a basis for the preparation of medium term development plans of member states of the Union, the Regional Economic Communities and the AU Organs.

The document seeks to: identify priority areas, their associated targets / expected outcomes and indicative strategies to stakeholders; highlight the fast track programmes/projects that will bring quick wins and generate and sustain the interest of the African Citizenry in the African Agenda; assign responsibilities and accountabilities to all stakeholders in the implementation, monitoring and evaluation of the plan and outline the strategies required to ensure resource and capacity availability and sustained citizen’s engagement for plan execution.

Goals and Priority Areas for the First Ten Year Implementation Plan

Agenda 2063 is a 50 year strategic document and hence priorities had to be set within it for the First Ten Year Implementation Plan. The goals, priority areas within a goal and targets within a priority area were to a large extent influenced by four factors:

1. Flagship Projects: All the flagship projects and programmes approved by the AU Summit are included in the First Ten Year Implementation Plan. The African Citizenry through the consultations in the preparation of the 50 year framework document and supported by the AU Summit came out with 12 programmes/projects which they will like to see implemented immediately even before the adoption of the First Ten Year Implementation Plan.

Flagship Programmes/Projects of Agenda 2063

• Integrated High Speed Train Network: Connecting all African capitals and commercial centres through an African High Speed Train to facilitate movement of goods, factor services and people, reduce transport costs and relieve congestion of current and future systems.

• An African Virtual and E-University. Increasing access to tertiary and continuing education in Africa by reaching large numbers of students and professionals in multiple sites simultaneously and developing relevant and high quality Open, Distance and eLearning (ODeL) resources to offer the prospective student a guaranteed access to the University from anywhere in the world and anytime (24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

• Formulation of a commodities strategy. Enabling African countries add value, extract higher rents from their commodities, integrate into the Global Value chains, and promote vertical and horizontal diversification anchored in value addition and local content development.

• Establishment of an annual African forum. Designed to bring together, once a year, the African political leadership, the private sector, academia and civil society to discuss developments and constraints as well as measures to be taken to realize the Aspirations and goals of Agenda 2063.

• Establishment of the Continental Free Trade Area by 2017. To significantly accelerate growth of Intra-Africa trade and use trade more effectively as an engine of growth and sustainable development, through doubling of intra-Africa trade by 2022, strengthen Africa’s common voice and policy space in global trade negotiations and establish the financial institutions within agreed upon timeframes: African Investment Bank and Pan African Stock Exchange (2016); the African Monetary Fund (2018); and the African Central Bank (2028/34).

• The African Passport and free movement of people: Transforming Africa’s laws, which remain generally restrictive on movement of people despite political commitments to bring down borders with the view to promoting the issuance of visas by Member States enhance free movement of all African citizens in all African countries by 2018.

• Implementation of the Grand Inga Dam Project. The optimal development of the Inga Dam will generate 43,200 MW of power (PIDA) to support current regional power pools and their combined service to transform Africa from traditional to modern sources of energy and ensure access of all Africans to clean and affordable electricity.

• The Pan-African E-Network. This involves a wide range of stakeholders and envisages putting in in place policies and strategies that will lead to transformative e-applications and services in Africa; especially the intra-African broad band terrestrial infrastructure; and cyber security, making the information revolution the basis for service delivery in the bio and nanotechnology industries and ultimately transform Africa into an e-Society.

• Silencing the guns by 2020. Ending all wars, civil conflicts, gender based violence and violent conflicts and prevent genocide. Monitor progress through the establishment and operationalization of an African Human Security Index (AHSI)

• Africa Outer Space Strategy aims to strengthen Africa’s use of outer space to bolster its development. Outer space is of critical importance to the development of Africa in all fields: agriculture, disaster management, remote sensing, climate forecast, banking and finance, as well as defence and security. Africa’s access to space technology products is no longer a matter of luxury and there is a need to speed up access to these technologies and products. New developments in satellite technologies make these very accessible to African countries. The Brazzaville meeting on aerial space technologies underlines the need for appropriate policies and strategies in order to develop regional market for space products in Africa.

• Establishment of a single African air transport market: This flagship Programme aims at delivering the single African air transport market to facilitate air transportation in Africa.

• Establishment of the African financial institutions: Establishment of the Continental Financial Institutions: aims at accelerating integration and socio-economic development of the continent, as they are important institutions when it comes to the mobilization of resources and management of financial sector.

2. Near Term National and RECs Development Priorities: National Plans of Member States were reviewed in addition to the strategic plans of the RECs. The focus areas of their development priorities have been included in the First Ten Year Implementation Plan – this will ensure that their priorities in the near term converge with the priority areas contained in the 50 year framework document. The priority areas that emerged include:

• Sustainable and inclusive economic growth
• Human Capital Development
• Agriculture/value addition and agro-businesses development
• Employment generation, especially the youth and females
• Social Protection
• Gender/Women development and youth empowerment
• Good governance including capable institutions
• Infrastructural development
• Science, Technology, Innovation
• Manufacturing-based industrialization
• Peace and Security
• Culture, Arts and Sports

3. Continental Frameworks: The AUC has developed continental frameworks as Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Programme (CAADP), Programme for Infrastructural Development in Africa (PIDA), African Mining Vision (AMV) , Science Technology Innovation Strategy for Africa (STISA), Boosting Intra African Trade (BIAT), Accelerated Industrial Development for Africa (AIDA) amongst others to support Member States of the Union in their development efforts. These frameworks are being implemented by some member states and to ensure coherence and convergence, they have to be captured in the priority areas of the First Ten Year Implementation Plan.

4. Agenda 2063 Results Framework: All the targets in the 50 year framework document that are due by 2023 must be included in the First Ten Year Implementation Plan. Examples are AU Decisions/Directives and AU Plan of Action/Treaties.

Key Transformational Outcomes by 2023

Chapter three provides the plan framework – aspirations and their associated goals; goals and their associated priority areas; priority areas and their associated targets at the national, regional and continental levels; and targets and their indicate strategies. These together constitute the results framework for the First Ten Year Implementation Plan and when achieved by 2023 at the national, regional and continental levels there would be transformations in five key areas – highlights of such expected outcomes include:

Transformed, Inclusive and Sustainable Economies

• GDP will be growing at 7% and at least a third of the outputs will be generated by national firms.

• Labour intensive manufacturing, underpinned by value addition to commodities and doubling of the total agricultural factor productivity will be attained by 2023

• The beginnings of value addition blue economy – fisheries, eco-friendly coastal tourism, marine bio-technology products and port operations – will emerge.

• Creative arts businesses will be contributing twice as much in real terms their 2013 contribution to GDP.

• ICT penetration and contribution to real GDP in absolute terms would be double of 2013 levels.

• Regional industrialization hubs linked to the global value chains and commodity exchanges will be in place by 2023.

• At least 17% of terrestrial and inland water and 10% of coastal and marine areas would have been preserved and 30% of farmers, fisher folks and pastoralist will be practicing climate resilient production systems.

Integrated Africa

• There will free movement of goods, services and capital; and persons travelling to any member state could get the visa at the point of entry.

• The volume of intra-African trade especially in agricultural value added products would increase three fold by 2023.

• The African Customs Union, an African Common Market and an African Monetary Union will be operational by 2023.

• The African Speed Train Network will have passed the inception stage and will be taking its first passengers between two connected cities.

• African Skies will be open to all African Airlines

• Regional power pools boosted by at least 50% increase in power generation and the INGA dam will be operational and will contribute to the powering of the industrial transformation of the continent and comfort of the citizenry.

• African Education Accreditation Agency and a common educational system are in place and the African Youth will have the choice to study at any university and work anywhere on the continent.

Implementation, Monitoring and Evaluation of the Plan

The targets set in the plan cover national, the RECs and continental bodies, especially the AU Organs. Roles and responsibilities have been assigned to all these stakeholders in the implementation, monitoring and evaluation of the First Ten Year Implementation Plan. The implementation also covers building capacities of all the stakeholders to execute the plans and engaging citizens to own the process and outcomes of the plan implementation.

Capacity Development for the Implementation of the First Ten-Year Plan

Lessons learnt from the implementation of past continental frameworks indicate the necessity for building the capacities of all stakeholders at the continental, regional and national levels. It is against this background that a capacity assessment and development plan is being prepared to cover some of the AU Organs and the RECs in the first instance and later to the national levels.

It is anticipated that the implementation of the outcomes of the capacity assessment and development studies will deepen the planning, monitoring and evaluation skills of development managers; strengthen institutional/organizational effectiveness in development management; provide transformative and visionary leadership and the enabling policy, legal and regulatory environment required for the successful execution of the First Ten Year Implementation plan at all levels.

Financing the Ten Year Plan

Financing Needs for First Ten Years: Agenda 2063 Financing and Resource Mobilization Strategy (RMS) outlines the key areas where resources will be required, the potential sources to finance each of these needs, processes for operationalization for matching demand and supply for funds at the national and regional/continental levels and institutional arrangements for making it happen.

Sources of Finance for the First Ten Years: The typology of the sources for financing ranges from government budgetary increases, crowd sourcing for social causes, pure commercial finance from both public and private sources/savings including domestic capital markets, concessional loans, market price-based commercial loans, equity and other market instruments, FDI, portfolio investments by the private sector (debt, bonds, equity and other securities).

Domestic resource mobilization (DRM) is meant to contribute at least 75% to 90% of the financing of Agenda 2063 on average per country, namely through: (i) enhanced fiscal resource mobilization, (ii) maximization of natural resource rents – OGM, agriculture, maritime, tourism, etc.; (iii) the leveraging of the increasingly important pool of African institutional savings – pension funds, central bank foreign exchange reserves, sovereign wealth funds and capital market development; (iv) enhanced retail savings mobilization through financial inclusion namely; (v) the curbing of illicit financial flows; (vi) the reduction of inefficiency and governance/corruption-based financial leakages and wastages – government, infrastructure services, agriculture value chain, etc. Agenda 2063 should also be rightly financed through external financing mechanisms including (i) FDI, official development assistance (ODA); (ii) financial cooperation from emerging development partners such as BRICS countries, Arab world, etc.; (iii) FDI, PPP et other forms of investment partnerships; (iv) the leveraging of Diaspora remittances and savings; (v) improved access to the international financial markets.

Channelling Resources into Agenda 2063 Programs and Projects: It is to be noted that Africa needs not only funds, but also a more effective and inclusive means of channelling funds (including financial institutions and markets, financial instruments and financial services) to where they can be most effective and where there is market failure in the allocation of the needed resources.

From that perspective, three levels of financial intermediation vehicles and resource channelling vehicles will be considered as part of the First 10 Year Implementation Plan:

• Existing commercial financial intermediation vehicles such as, one the one hand, commercial banks, microfinance institutions (MFI), development finance institutions (DFI), insurance companies, etc. that will need to be up-scaled through additional capitalization and capacitated in relevant financial services and project finance expertise areas; and on the other hand, stock exchanges and bond markets that will need to be expanded, deepened and regionalized.

• New commercial financial intermediation vehicles to be created such as Africa 50 Fund, Africa Credit Guarantee Facility (ACGF), Africa Investment Bank (AIB), Africa Infrastructure Development Facility (AIDF), Diaspora bonds, Diaspora remittances securitization, African-owned private equity funds, African Angel Investors Network (AAIN), regional stock exchanges, regional commodity exchanges. Other processes that will promote commercial financing include: Intra-African investment promotion, PPPs targeted at African investors and local government DRM tools such as retail bond for infrastructure services for example

• Non-commercial finance channelling or intermediation vehicles to be considered include existing vehicles such as AU, RECs and Member State budgets and new vehicles to be created such as African Integration Fund (AIF), Fund for African Women, Youth Empowerment and Entrepreneurship Fund; but also crowd funding solutions for social or emergency causes.

Facilitation Measures for Access to Finance: During the period of the First Ten Year Plan the following facilitation measures will be put in place at the national, regional and continental level, depending on its appropriateness within the context of Agenda 2063 Resource Mobilization Strategy (RMS).

• Developing/implementing generic “framework conditions” (policy, legal, regulatory and institutional framework) for private sector development and industry/issue-specific enabling conditions (financial industry development, PPP/Infrastructure financing, large industrial project financing, private equity/venture capital market development, SME finance/banking and microfinance).

• Setting up relevant project development funds, viability gap funds, capitalization funds, blending facilities to address demand side readiness.

• Establishing information infrastructure (country rating system, corporate governance standards, credit bureau and collateral registries etc.)

• Developing expertise in financial advisory services and specialist financial services where there is significant gap across Africa (project finance, capital market, private equity/venture capital, financial engineering, risk management and industry-specific financial services)

• Putting in place risk sharing and guarantee facilities to “de-risk” investment into African securities and enhance the risk of lending to African SME namely.

Leveraging Africa’s Strategic Partnerships

The African Union has entered into a number of strategic partnerships to support its development process: Africa-EU, Africa-USA, Africa-Japan, Africa-China, Africa-India, Africa-Arab League of States, Africa-South America, Africa-Turkey, and Africa-Korea with more demand for partnership in the pipeline. However, the full potential of the financial pledges and technical assistance pledges embedded in these partnerships are yet to fully leverage from the African side. Hence, going forward the following three levels of actions need to be considered by the AU to take maximum advantage of its strategic partnerships:

• Preparing a comprehensive AU policy framework and articulating a partnership strategy for all high-potential partners around a limited number of interventions with meaningful socio-economic transformational benefits;

• Maximizing Africa’s potential to exploit the full potential of its partnership by enhancing its strategic, governance, technical, logistical and financial support to the partnership management function of the AUC; by bringing more clarity to the implementation model of Africa’s various continental programs (PIDA, CAADP/3ADI, AIDA/APCII/RADS/AMV, BIAT) to facilitate result-oriented cooperation with its strategic partners; and by improved involvement and coordination of/among Africa’s various stakeholders of the partnership process: AUC, NPC, AfDB, RECs, Member States, PSO, CSO and other AU organs; and

• Deepening transformational benefits of the partnerships through alignment to Agenda 2063 priorities, namely: Agenda 2063 flagship projects, natural resource-based and STI-based industrialization and technology transfer, intra-African trade and export development, private sector and MSME development, financial market development, support to the post-2015 Agenda in social and sustainable development and domestic financial resource mobilization.