Time for action on NEPAD, finance ministers say

It was now "time to move from vision to action" in implementing the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), African finance ministers agreed at the weekend.

The ministers had reached consensus on many "issues of critical importance in accelerating Africa's progress and development and in meeting the challenges of implementing NEPAD", at the conference held in South Africa.

In a statement released on Monday, finance ministers from throughout the continent said they had agreed "on the overall vision for Africa's development as enshrined in NEPAD: to bring the continent into a new age of peace, security, stability, economic growth, and prosperity ... [and] setting the stage for growth through regional integration, by putting in place sound macro-economic policies, improving trade policies, and attracting more foreign capital".

Among the priorities agreed upon for the implementation of NEPAD were: "pursuing sound economic policies, unleashing the private sector for poverty reduction, enhancing capacity building for deeper integration into the global economy, embracing the African Peer Review mechanism, and transforming our partnerships with donors through mutual accountability," the ministers said.

"And given the prominence of AIDS, malaria, and other infectious diseases as threats to African development, combating them must be part of the [Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper] PRSP process. Greater attention must also go to formulating gender-sensitive policies for health, education, and other services," they agreed.

The ministers also undertook to improve public expenditure management systems in their respective countries and enhance "transparency in the use of resources".

"Especially urgent is providing duty-free, quota-free access for products originating from African countries. We also call for simplifying and harmonising rules of origin to help ensure that African countries benefit from the market opportunities granted, particularly in value-added production," the ministers noted.

Debt relief was also high on their agenda.

"It is also clear that the HIPC [Highly Indebted Poor Countries] 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 is to move faster to increase relief, to align it with the pursuit of the MDGs [Millennium Development Goals], and to free up more resources for development. We also recognise the need to attend to the debt burden of non-HIPC countries," the statement said.

The conference was held under the auspices of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA).

ECA spokesman Peter da Costa told IRIN the conference was a "tremendous success because for the first time NEPAD has moved from the high level of heads-of-state and foreign ministers to the level of the practitioners, finance ministers, who will implement the initiatives. They're the ones on whom the success of NEPAD depends".

Another notable benefit of the conference was that African ministers appeared to have embraced the peer review mechanism. "Initially the fear was that there would be conditionality upon conditionality [placed on acceptance of the peer review mechanism] ... but the ministers discussions were extremely encouraging," Da Costa said.

ECA agreed with the ministers that "a new way of addressing debt that actually works" needed to be found. The organisation called on African ministers to "do more to articulate an African position on debt relief ... they need to engage the international community more on that," Da Costa said.