Source: AFRODAD
The analysis indicates the culpability of the IMF, World Bank and the international community to the very serious growth and development reversals that Zambia has suffered particularly during the 1990s as a result of its faithful adherence to their programmes and conditionalities.
The challenge remains that of bringing the IMF and the World Bank and indeed some donors to account for their roles in the Zambian economic and social crisis. This paper is part of the collection of evidence that could be presented for arbitration and prosecution. However, it will be necessary to collect more materials and to strengthen the evidential presentations.
It is expected that the IMF, World Bank and lenders will invoke the standard disclaimer that the policies, programmes and projects that are the subject of contention were generated by the Zambian Government. However, there is circumstantial evidence that most of such policies and projects were evolved around the [understood and known] conditionalities of the lenders. Furthermore, un-collaborated stories abound about the roles of the IMF, World Bank and lenders in the preparation of the policy and project documents and protocols for the Zambian Government. It can also be argued that the IMF, World Bank and donors were aware or ought to have been aware the Zambian Government since October 1991 has had severely reduced capacities due to the desperate economic situation, lack of experience among the senior political and administrative officials and, more importantly, high levels of corruption.
The second challenge will be the creation of an international institutional framework to provide arbitration and trial. There are already in existence certain global, regional and bilateral structures that could act as hosts for such an arbitral court.
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Source: AFRODAD
This study, carried out at the request of AFRODAD, explores evidences of the illegitimate nature of the debt the government of Cameroon incurred for the construction of the Chad-Cameroon Pipeline Project. This study raises a couple of questions as to the loans contracted by Cameroon to participate in the project. The full failure or delay in the implementation of the CAPECE project has been considered either as directly or indirectly contributing to most of the socio-economic and environmental problems generated by the pipeline project.
The delay in the implementation of the CAPECE project could not be blamed alone on the government of Cameroon's lapses but also on the Bank, which until 2003 had only disbursed about 10% of the relevant Bank credit that was to finance the CAPECE project. This meant that it was impossible for the CPSP to maintain a permanent field presence during the construction phase. The delay or failure in the implementation of the CAPECE project was in gross violation of OD 4.01 Paragraph 12 on the strengthening of the environmental capacity for the government to effectively assess construction impacts during the implementation and monitoring phase of the project. Cameroon continues to use most of its oil revenue for the servicing of its external and domestic debts as was the case for 2004. An October 2005 audit by the government estimated its domestic debts and arrears to equal to about 1.5 billion francs CFA .
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Source: World Vision
World Vision has recently published an extensive new report that sheds some light on the inner workings of the African Union and the opportunities and challenges for civil society groups in Africa to engage with and influence the institution, particularly in relation to AU Commission and the Economic, Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC)
The report outlines some of the tensions that exist amongst African CSOs and between African and international CSOs in their engagement with the AU:
“Two types of CSO actors are identified – insiders comfortable with the evolving ECOSOCC; and outsiders who are becoming increasingly frustrated with what they consider to be the arbitrary and ad hoc way CSO engagement is organised. Increasingly, the crisis of expectations is pushing this second group to organise autonomously. Another pertinent issue raised in this chapter is the perceived dichotomy between international and African civil society, and the perceived efforts to exclude INGOs from membership of the ECOSOCC structure. This raises questions of legitimacy and authenticity, with one group speaking to the need for INGOs to take a back seat and work with coalitions, and to invest in building the capacity of indigenous African NGOs and CSOs as a deliberate strategy. Another school of thought asserts that successful advocacy necessitates pressure in both the North and South, and argues that a symbiotic approach between African and international NGOs is needed for real impact.â€
CSOs have been effective in engaging with the AU commission on several fronts including aid and debt issues but particularly on trade. Rather than putting all their eggs in one basket and honing in on the AU commission the report argues that CSOs, including World Vision, should use a multi-pronged strategy in their advocacy.
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Source: UNDP International Poverty Centre
The UNDP International Poverty Centre has published another briefing in its useful “one-pager†series. The latest publication looks at why ODA is being used to such an extent to accumulate foreign reserves in sub-Saharan Africa.
According to the recent IMF report “The IMF and aid to sub-Saharan Africa, 2007†only 63% of aid flows to the region were “absorbed†during 1999-2005. This means that 37% were not spent and instead were used to stockpile reserves in the country. Rising reserves are part of a trend in Africa that is encouraged by the IMF since the financial crisis of the 1990s. However reserves in developing countries are now roughly three times that of rich countries.
This trend is largely a response to capital account liberalisation and free movement of capital in and out that have made access to liquid money important. Reserves are also a defence against aid volatility.
But current IMF advice and reserve accumulation practice seem to addressing the symptom rather than the cause of the problem. More active management of capital accounts and vastly improved predictability in aid disbursements by donors would reduce the need for such high reserves and free up money to be spent as it was intended – i.e. to address the real needs of the country in addressing poverty and injustice and attaining the MDGs.
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OECD
This annual report reviews the recent economic situation, the likely short-term evolution, and the social and political context of selected African economies. The AEO features a country-by-country analysis based on a common analytical framework and a simple macroeconomic model to provide forecasts for 2007 and 2008. It also contains a comparative synthesis of African prospects by region, placing the evolution of African economies in the context of the world economy.
Combining the expertise of the African Development Bank and OECD Development Centre, the AEO is a unique tool for African and OECD-based decision makers from the public and private sector, including aid agencies, investors, and government officials of aid-recipient countries. It benefits from the generous support of the European Commission.
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Source: Open Society Initiative for East Africa and the Africa Governance Monitoring and Advocacy Project (AfriMAP)
This review of the APRM process in Kenya is one of series commissioned by AfriMAP. The report analyses the extent to which the Kenyan process of self-assessment for the APRM respected the criteria of effectiveness and credibility defined by the APRM founding documents, in particular the extent to which it was open, participatory, transparent and accountable.
Based on interviews with many of the participants and his own involvement in the process, the author of the report, Steve Ouma Akoth, reviews the challenges faced by the APRM review. These included weaknesses in the National Governing Council and in civil society engagement, and problems with the conceptual framework of NEPAD and the APRM itself. Though Ouma concludes that the APRM in Kenya was a "state-centric process" he also believes that it has opened up an opportunity for dialogue between civil society and government that should be exploited during the implementation of the programme of action (PoA) formally adopted for Kenya in June 2006 by the APR Forum.
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Source: ActionAid
The United States is the single largest provider of food aid, supplying about half of total global resources. While there is no doubt that this aid has saved countless lives, the current program is based on an outdated model which is dependent on the shipment of US commodities to developing countries. When its food aid program was created over 50 years ago, the US had 2 substantial excess food reserves. Food aid served as an outlet for those excess stocks while also serving vital humanitarian objectives. Food aid programs were also intended to bolster US political objectives and to create new export markets for US goods. Times have changed, but food aid programs have not.
Furthermore, over the last few decades, food crises have become distressingly common phenomena. Women are often at the center of these emergencies, though the disproportionate impact of hunger on women is too often hidden within the dire aggregate statistics. But the role of women in providing solutions to these crises is also too often overlooked. This discussion paper lays out some of the key issues in modern food crises and explores some opportunities for engaging women more actively in the quest for more effective answers. Among the recommendations made in the report include for donors, the need to stop imposing trade rules and economic policy conditions that make it difficut for African government to support smallholder farmes, and push them towards excessive relaicne on export-driven agriculture at the expense of food crops for local markets. The recommendations for African governments include the need to promote and enforce women’s rights to land, credit, water, seeds and other productive resources.
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Source: ISODEC
In the 2003 budget statement to Parliament, the Government of Ghana announced the formation of a Multi-Donor Budget Support (MDBS) scheme to deal with “shortfalls in donor inflows†and to ensure that donors “disburse funds directly into the Consolidated Fund to support government’s implementation of the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy through the budget.†The introduction of the MDBS was the culmination of reforms by some creditor organisations in response to complaints by various aid recipients over the erratic and often counter-productive nature of aid processes and conditionalities. In particular, the Rome Declaration of 2002 by aid providers and recipients, along with the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DfiD), urged some kind of direct budget support for recipient countries in order to reduce transaction costs and expedite the disbursement of foreign aid to those countries
In the first year of its implementation, the MDBS achieved a modest success by eliminating the problem of shortfalls in donor inflows and in fact registering a surplus. Data from the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning indicates that the disbursement of programme loans and grants from external sources in 2003 exceeded the budget forecast by about 4.0 percent, a sharp contrast to the shortfalls of 45.0 percent in 2001 and 2002, respectively. By this result, the MDBS can be adjudged successful in the government’s attempts to deal with the problem of delays and shortfalls in “donor inflows.†This success, however, has important implications for Ghana’s capacity to finance development in the future, because it further deepens the country’s dependence on external sources of development finance, a situation which makes Ghana vulnerable to any future disruptions in such financing and renders it susceptible to the political manipulations of external creditors. In the absence of any viable “exit strategy†from Ghana’s “dependency syndrome†in terms of improved domestic resource mobilisation, this success may well turn into a major disappointment and a problem for economic management in the not-too-distant future.
Already, pledges for 2004 under the MDBS are about 7.0 percent lower than they were in 2003. Although these are only indicative pledges and may be increased by the creditors in line with their various aid policies, the possibility also exists that they would remain the same or be reduced further. Any celebration of the success of MDBS in its first year of operations must, therefore, be tempered with the possibility of such setbacks in the future.
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Source: ISODEC
Sector-wide approaches (SWAPs) and the Comprehensive Development Framework (CDF) have become the institutional operationalisation of the “partnership†framework currently favoured as a means of delivering development assistance, representing a shift from a concern with preconditions to a concern with establishing common intent†reflected in a shared and coherent policy framework and POW led by the GOG in contrast with the top-down “conditionalityâ€. The central goal of the partnership framework is to promote country ownership of policies and programmes as a prerequisite for sustaining reform through better coordination and better management of resources. Ghana was one of eleven countries to pilot the CDF.
The paper provides an overview of the problems associated with SWAps, argues that the links between the GPRS, the CDF and programmes of the MDA remain tenuous and recommends that linkages between sectoral programmes and the Medium erm Expenditure Framework be strengthened.
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Source: ISODEC
This commentary argues that in the absence of a complete debt cancellation and the fact that Ghana had to implement the conditionalities, taking up the HIPC initiative was the best option given circumstances at the time. Some of the targeted beneficiaries had at the time been allocated the funds to carry out their poverty related projects and programme.
However, the commentary questions the basis upon which resources were allocated. It argues that decisions were based on political expedience rather than on needs, targets and/or priorities. It goes on to say the Government of Ghana has learnt little from the PAMSCAD of the 1980s as it implements the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy. Many do not see the link between poverty reduction and the emphasis on huge infrastructural expenditure, private sector development and macroeconomic stability.
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