Follow-up to UN social summit stresses depth of problem

Some 350 participants from 24 countries in eastern and southern Africa began a three-day conference in Nairobi yesterday to assess the status of implementation of the goals and targets agreed in Copenhagen four years ago at the World Summit on Social Development. In his welcome remarks, Professor George Saitoti, Kenya’s Minister of Planning and National Development, said the aim of the Nairobi conference was to monitor, rather than to fully evaluate, compliance to the actions agreed in Copenhagen, and would provide a forum for countries to share experiences on how they had addressed the problem of poverty. In her opening statement, Lalla Ben Barka, Deputy Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), noted that 32 of the world’s 45 Least Developed Countries were in Africa. The good news, said Ben Barka, was that overall, African economies had demonstrated encouraging economic performances since Copenhagen, growing at a rate of 3.2 percent in the four years after the Summit as compared to by 1 percent in the two years preceding the Summit. Yet the growth still fell far short of the rates required to reduce poverty by half by the year 2015. The ECA estimates that sustained GDP growth rates of 8 percent for east Africa and 6 percent for southern Africa are needed. Furthermore, in most countries of the region, the positive growth achievements had not been matched by recovery in the social sectors. “A major problem”, stressed Ben Barka, “is the fact that per capita GDP growth has been too minuscule to have a significant impact on the social sectors”. Secondly, there had not been sufficient political will to divert the required resources to social development. The conference - the first of three African subregional follow-ups to Copenhagen taking place in 1999 - is being co-organised by ECA and UNDP, in collaboration with the Kenyan government, an ECA press statement said.