Prospects and Challenges for the New Partnership for Africa's Development: Addressing Capacity Deficits

Abstract

The New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) offers a comprehensive and integrated strategic framework for addressing Africa’s development challenges. It was adopted by the Assembly of African Heads of State and Government of the then Organisation of African Unity (OAU), now the African Union (AU), in July 2001, and has been well received by the international community. The United Nations (UN), the G8, the European Union (EU), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the African Development Bank (AfDB), among others, have all endorsed and supported the NEPAD. In fact, the NEPAD framework now forms the basis upon which much of Africa’s donor support is based. Indeed, the work of the Commission for Africa (CFA), established by the UK’s Prime Minister Tony Blair, has as one of its objectives “To support the best existing work on Africa, in particular the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and the African Union, and help ensure this work achieves its goals” (CFA nd:1). Indeed, the CFA Report (2005), entitled Our Common Interest, provides an analytical summary of Africa’s needs and the resource requirements to meet them based on NEPAD priorities (CFA 2005). Moreover, literature is beginning to emerge on the NEPAD, including some criticisms from sceptics and Afro-pessimists. 1 Those critics are echoing a chorus from the same song sheet and, one might add, a seeming desire, that the NEPAD will fail as previous African development initiatives did. This view, though significantly a minority one, should not be allowed to come true. The overwhelming national and international support for the NEPAD must be utilised to good effect in order to regain the momentum for development achievement that is being pursued through moving the NEPAD forward. The NEPAD potentially constitutes the most important advance in African development policy in the past four decades (Hope 2002a). Undoubtedly it is an ambitious programme and represents perhaps one last hope for Africa to reverse its slide into complete marginalisation and irrelevance. In that regard, the major challenges in moving the NEPAD forward need to be recognised and confronted. This paper is concerned with one of those challenges – the problem of capacity deficits. Ownership without capacity must be regarded as meaningless. The existence