IF assurances from Africa's Finance, Economics, Planning and Development Ministers and other stakeholders are anything to go by, the continent may soon achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and general economic wellbeing.
To achieve the goal, the stakeholders Monday adopted a position paper during a plenary session at the on-going 6th Joint Annual Meeting of the Africa Union (AU) Conference of Ministers of Economy and Finance and the ECA Conference of Ministers of Finance, Planning and Economic Development, holding in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire.
Those who attended the meeting included President Alassane Ouattara of Cote d'Ivoire; Chairperson of the African Union Commission (AUC), Dr. Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma; the United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), Mr. Carlos Lopez; President of the African Development Bank (AfDB), Dr. Donald Kaberuka, as well as over 30 ministers from various Africa countries, including the Governor Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi.
Participants at the event stressed the need for Africa to play a leading role in defining and shaping the post-2015 MDGs agenda, in order to ensure that it truly addressed the continent's development needs.
Such agenda, according to a joint draft statement issued, must be sufficiently inclusive, without necessarily increasing the range of development goals and indicators contained in the MDGs framework, as well as the process should be pursued through a bottom-up approach rather than the traditional top-down approach that has characterised the formulation of previous development agenda or frameworks.
While statistics and the capacity to develop appropriate indicators for measuring and tracking progress in Africa's development were very important, participants wanted the on-going discussions on the post-2015 agenda to allow for necessary adjustments to accelerate progress towards the achievement of the MDGs between now and 2015.
In addition to calling on countries to allocate adequate resources to fast-track the MDGs, the AUC, ECA, AfDB and the UNDP were also urged to establish a technical working group to translate Africa's priorities for the post-2015 agenda into a concrete goal targets and to feed them into the sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) process and the post-2015 global agenda. Calls were made on the need for Africa to speak with one voice on the global discussion to chart the post-2015.
Noting that significant strides had been made in the fight against HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, the participants stated that despite these improvements, major challenges persisted in the areas of poverty reduction, food security and health, with nearly half of the continent's population still living on less that US$1.25 per day, among others.
Lopez, who said that Africa must generate its own data, further stressed that the time for action was now.
He lamented that the continent often attracted unfair negative categorisation. "Yes, there's crisis in Mali, but Mali is one of the examples of declining conflicts in Africa. Asia has bigger armed conflicts than Africa. Why should there be generalised perception of unsafe Africa?" wondered Lopez.
The Guardian