NEPAD: making individual bests a continental norm. (SystemWatch).

The New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) is the most important advance in development thinking for Africa in the past forty years. Why? Because it provides leadership: that leadership assures ownership; and that ownership changes the rules for partnerships outside the continent. It is first and foremost a framework for a new partnership between African leaders and African peoples. At its core is a commitment by Africa's leaders to creating the enabling environment for economic development.

They are taking joint responsibility for promoting and protecting democracy and human rights, and by promoting the advance of African women in social and economic development. Through NEPAD, they are also committed to restoring and sustaining macroeconomic stability and to building the capacity to enforce the legal framework, uphold law and order and strengthen the mechanisms to reestablish and maintain peace and security.

With NEPAD, Africa's leaders have set their own agenda for the continent's renewal--an agenda based on national and regional priorities, with plans prepared through participatory processes, giving voice to their people.

As research shows, good development outcomes are far more likely under such true ownership, because it directly affects programme acceptance and implementation. One precondition for ownership is national capacity--to plan, to manage, to deliver. And as development programmes become Africa owned and led, their oversight will shift from donor-conditionality to self-monitoring and peer review. That means donors will have to be willing to coordinate their aid and policy approaches with African agendas, and redirect their technical assistance to building capacity for the long term.

There is a pressing need for new, stronger partnerships between African leaders and their societies, and between all States of the region, in order to effectively meet the continent's development challenges. It is thus of critical importance that NEPAD is more than a top-down or top-top process at the country level, or one where at the regional level only a few countries are moving forward.

NEPAD must be for everyone. Indeed, its true success is predicated on the active involvement of all Africans. This, however, is not yet the case and there remains much confusion and misunderstanding about the framework, especially among some quarters of civil society.

As a result, it is clear that the initiative needs to be better explained and better understood so as to promote a sense of involvement and ownership among all stakeholders. Africa also cannot achieve sustainable growth without a transformed partnership with the international community--a new partnership based on mutual responsibility for agreed development outcomes.

An essential part of that responsibility is peer review by Africans. Another big change is the move from fragmented donor-driven projects to predictable long-term support for Africa-owned programmes, and to a more mature partnership characterized by two-way dialogues and consensus-building. At the heart of NEPAD is the implication that partnership modalities must be tailored to fit a diversity of conditions. Given the diversity in Africa, different forms of development assistance might therefore be offered to the following three groups of countries on the continent:

Those with well-articulated development strategies and the capacity to implement them. They are committed to sustaining their macro fundamentals to reduce poverty through broad-based growth, and have transparent and accountable systems of public finance. Also, they have in place the systems and processes that would allow them to benefit from direct budget support, with a shift from conditionality to self-monitoring, fostered by peer review.

Those that face severe capacity constraints. They could benefit from project support, and if they have a solid medium-term programme of sectoral priorities and institutional reforms, they could also benefit from sector-wide adjustment programmes.

Those that are emerging from conflict or suffering from breakdowns of the State. For such countries that have to rebuild economic and political institutions and rehabilitate their infrastructure, special types of assistance, such as reconstruction credits, technical assistance packages, and stand-alone projects in targeted areas, might be suitable.

The idea is not to box countries into well-defined categories, but to offer markers for differentiating donor assistance and encourage countries to put in place the systems and processes that would allow them to move to enhanced partnerships. How then to move from the principles of the NEPAD document towards actions that lead to tangible improvements in the living conditions of the people of Africa? This starts with a more effective mobilization of domestic resources--public and private, physical and human. Substantial capacity exists in Africa, but that capacity is not used or is used inefficiently; therefore, it must be tapped more efficiently and strengthened.

Now is the time to move from vision to action. One immediate way to show concrete results is to anchor the foundations of NEPAD in rigorous analysis and build its objectives into national programmes. Second is to engage parliaments and private and civil stakeholders in country-owned development strategies. Third is to move forward on sub-regional projects, especially for infrastructure. Fourth is to move quickly on the African Peer Review (APR) mechanism.

Moving boldly will naturally require unwavering leadership and considerable political will, engaging all stakeholders and all society in the development process. National policies must move to the sub-regional, regional and then to the continental levels to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). That involves sound economic policies, unleashing the potential of the private sector in the quest for poverty reduction, enhancing capacity-building for deeper integration into the global economy, embracing the APR mechanism and transforming our partnerships with donors through mutual accountability.

Three significant areas have to be addressed at the national level. First is sound policy-making and public expenditure management. The framework for this is poverty reduction, central to which are the MDGs. These strategies must be integrated with macroeconomic targets in development plans, public expenditure management systems strengthened to ensure efficient resource allocation, and better statistical systems established to monitor and evaluate progress. There is a need to ensure both greater policy coherence and greater policy convergence. Good economic and corporate governance, financing facilities and strategic partnerships are also crucial in promoting the role of the private sector, with an appropriate mix of public-private partnerships, especially in social services.

A second issue is deeper integration into global markets. Africa's outcomes at Doha were mixed, but we achieved a lot more than in many previous trade rounds. Going forward, our international partners must swiftly remove all further barriers to trade, particularly the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's agricultural subsidies, tariff peaks and numerous non-tariff barriers. Duty-free, quota-free access for products originating from African countries is needed, as is simplification and harmonization of rules of origin, to help ensure these countries benefit from market opportunities granted. African representation in global trade talks must also be improved.

And African countries must do much more to increase market access and trade within the continent, opening their markets to other African countries by reducing tariffs, dismantling cumbersome border procedures and improving infrastructure. Of special importance is the promotion of interregional cooperation, and rationalizing and strengthening the regional economic communities. They also need to integrate trade into national development strategies and implement behind-the-border reforms that can ignite the supply response. Another key area of intervention relates to building national capacities for effective participation in multilateral trade negotiations. NEPAD provides a framework to develop common negotiating objectives that would enhance Africa's negotiating power at World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings.

Third is the issue of mutual accountability. Suffice it to say that as Africa gets its systems and peer review process in order, its international partners will also have to keep pace with their own reforms.

NEPAD envisages transformed partnerships underpinned by African ownership of the continent's development strategies. There should be mutual commitment to shared development goals. The new relations with development partners will hinge on mutual accountability. For Africans, the commitment to self-monitoring and peer learning is the linchpin to accountability. For partners, the key commitment is to ensure that all policies affecting African development prospects, including those for official development assistance, market access and debt, are consistent with achieving the MDGs. Primarily, this has to do with the quality and volume of support and the coherence of policies for trade and aid.

However, it is also clear that the heavily indebted poor countries (HIPC) initiative is not working well enough. Only six African countries have reached their completion points, and for some of them the debt remains unsustainable. Several proposals are on the table for moving beyond HIPC to greater debt relief; what is needed now is to move faster to that goal, align it with the pursuit of the MDGs, and free up more resources for development. There is also a need to attend to the debt burden of non-HIPC countries.

The United Nations has collectively agreed to the need for greater coherence and coordination in its work on Africa, with NEPAD as the single framework to channel its efforts to work on Africa, Furthermore, the forum for discussing these issues has been agreed to be the annual regional consultation of UN agencies working on Africa, convened by the Economic Commission for Africa. The challenge facing the United Nations family is how to bring about enhanced coherence and coordination, while at the same time respecting the various mandates of specific agencies, many of which have ongoing programmes at the country as well as regional levels. This task calls for a truly effective new partnership between the various arms of the UN system operating in Africa, in order to serve the continent better.

Many of the principles and processes underlining the NEPAD initiative are already being tested on an individual basis by a few African States and some international partners. What is different is that NEPAD aims to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts, make selective best practice a continental norm and create enhanced international support for Africa's development.

It is crucial that our emphasis be on working towards a number of NEPAD-related quick wins, so that we can successfully capitalize on the initial momentum behind, and widespread support for, the new partnership.

K. Y Amoako is Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa and board member of the Development Gateway Foundation, chairing its editorial committee. He was a member of the WHO Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, and served for several years in senior positions at the World Bank.