African Peer Review Mechanism Research Articles

Evaluating Development Projects and Programmes in Africa: The Case of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD)

This article begins with a brief introduction on monitoring and evaluation concepts, the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) and challenges of its performance evaluation. It is indicated that NEPAD has not prescribed any internal or external monitoring and evaluation of its projects and programmes, and therefore calls into doubt the level of professional competence in its delivery strategies. The article also examines selected monitoring and evaluation strategies such as the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) and others, which are embedded in the NEPAD workplan, but not suffi ciently applied in its operations. Monitoring and evaluation mechanisms such as the Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) and a few benchmarking evaluation techniques are recommended as possible introductory tools that could assist in the monitoring and evaluation of the NEPAD projects and programmes. Africa Insight Vol. 37 (4) 2008 pp. 61-74

The African Peer Review Mechanism and Human Rights: The First Reviews and the Way Forward

The African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), one of the spin-offs of the African development framework, NEPAD, offers a unique approach to the monitoring of agreed norms of political, economic, and corporate governance in Africa. This article analyzes the APRM structure and process with a focus on how the APRM could complement other efforts to realize the African Union objective of promotion and protection of human rights. The country review reports on Ghana, Kenya, and Rwanda are analyzed from a human rights perspective.

Peace, security and the African peer Review Mechanism: Are the tools up to the task?

The African Peer Review Mechanism is a novel system created by Africans to improve governance, promote compliance with global and continental standards and enhance development. Preventing and managing conflict is one of the many objectives of this process. The article examines the connections made between peace, governance and development, and how conflict-related concepts are described and interrogated in the mechanism's self-assessment questionnaire. It analyses and contrasts how the country review reports from Ghana, Kenya and Rwanda have described and assessed conflict issues in practice. On this basis, it asks whether the APRM is incisive enough to promote peace and stability on the continent

Grist for the Sceptic's Mill: Rwanda and the African Peer Review Mechanism

Grist for the Sceptic's Mill: Rwanda and the African Peer Review Mechanism

Taking stock of the African peer review mechanism

As the African Peer Review Mechanism marks its fifth birthday in 2007, the authors take stock of the initiative's successes and challenges. The APRM can claim considerable achievements but the complexity of the process, its slow pace, and problems in some review countries raise questions which are highlighted in this detailed examination.

The achievements and challenges of the New Partnership for Africa's Development

The New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) is a fairly recent African programme aimed at both general renewal and economic recovery through strategic endeavours by African governments with identified development partners. The author argues that NEPAD has already made significant progress in reaching some of its aims, particularly in the area of African ownership and leadership, and debt cancellation. However, NEPAD also faces formidable challenges: forging new partnerships, dismantling trade barriers, political dictatorships, the role of the African Peer Review Mechanism, possible polarisation, human resource investment, development and diversification of industries, and the eradication of a foreign aid mentality. Nevertheless, the author concludes that NEPAD is firmly based on clear principles, which are mandatory to its success in future. Africa Insight Vol. 36 (2) June 2006: 25-34

Ghana takes African governance exam

While Ghana is an “oasis of peace and tranquility” in West Africa and is moving increasingly towards consolidating democracy, its progress remains “fragile,” concludes a comprehensive African review of the country. The analysis, released publicly in mid-2006, was the first one completed under the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), a scheme through which African states voluntarily assess each other’s political and economic management, or “governance.”

Freedom of information: problems, prospects and lessons: the South African experience

The growing sense that governments are becoming more secretive in response to the threat of terrorism means that citizens as requesters of information call upon records professionals to assist in making governments more open to the need for information. Information professionals can use the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) to demonstrate the need for greater transparency to support freedom of information core principles of good governance, participative democracy, and individual self-determination (protection of privacy, access to personal information), and to ensure that information is seen as a socio-economic resource which has positive spin-off for economic development. The South African History Archive (SAHA) has undertaken fieldwork from which lessons can be learned of the difficulties and challenges of balancing an access to information regime with proper implementation strategies. This article aims to look at the South African access to information regime and the challenges that have prevented effective access to information in South Africa as experienced by SAHA. It argues for greater participation by records professionals in striving for greater transparency. Keywords : access to information, freedom of information legislation, South Africa, South African History Archive ESARBICA Journal Vol. 24 2005: 58-62

Inadequately self-critical: Rwanda’s self-assessment for the African peer review mechanism

Inadequately self-critical: Rwanda’s self-assessment for the African peer review mechanism

The Changing Human Rights Landscape in Africa: Organisation of African Unity, African Union, New Partnership for Africa's Development and the African Court

As Pliny the Elder once put it, ‘ex Africa semper aliquid novi’. There is always some thing new coming out of Africa, and this time for the better. Over the last decade, some important developments unfolded on the African continent with the potential to impact on the future of African peoples. The African Union (AU) whose major purpose is to place Africa firmly on the road to development replaced the Organisation of African Unity (OAU). The New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) was launched to achieve African renaissance. The African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) was devised as NEPAD's linchpin and both were integrated within the AU. The Protocol to the African Charter establishing an African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights finally came into operation. There is renewed hope that a new era has begun and time has come for Africa's development, which is not possible without a more effective and better protection of human rights. In this article, the author reflects on the changing human rights landscape in Africa under the AU, NEPAD, and the African Court.

African Peer Review Mechanism: An Assessment

In 2002 at the inaugural Summit of the African Union (AU) held in Durban, South Africa, the African Heads of State and Government committed themselves to adhere to international standards on democracy, good governance (political, economic and corporate), peace, the rule of law, and respect for human rights. They also agreed to hold each other accountable through African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM). The present paper examines whether the APRM constitutes a viable peer review mechanism; and, if not, how it can be strengthened?

Toward Good Governance and Sustainable Development: The African Peer Review Mechanism

To accomplish the objectives and the outcomes of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), African leaders have agreed, among other things, to subject their countries to peer review through the use of a unique and innovative African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM). This paper analytically describes and assesses the APRM. It contends that peer review represents a sea of change in the thinking of African leaders as they seek to reverse the trend of lack of accountability, political authoritarianism, state failure, and corruption to embrace and consolidate democracy as well as effect sound and transparent economic management. It is further argued that peer review would provide a number of benefits to those countries that subject themselves to it and that, in turn, would have positive multiplier effects on Africa's development performance.

States call each other to account

Setting the pace for other African states, Rwanda has become one of the first to allow external oversight of its performance under a new continental peer review programme. Rwanda’s assessment began in February 2004 under the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), an instrument that seeks to promote democracy and accountability on the continent. “Despite the significant economic and social progress made in the recent past, Rwanda still faces heavy challenges,” says Mr. Claver Gatete, a high-ranking Rwandan government official. Those relate mainly to the economic structure and poor governance, which contributed to the 1994 genocide, he explains. Rwanda confronts insufficient or ineffective government structures, a weak public sector, high population growth rates and unemployment. It also faces a host of economic and social problems that make the country difficult to run. Rwanda witnessed one of the worst genocides in modern history when 800,000 people, mainly ethnic Tutsis, were killed by militias and armed forces linked to the government in power at the time.

The African peer review mechanism (APRM): an assessment of concept and design

The African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) has been proposed as a key element of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD). It is important that the APRM be debated thoroughly in terms of concept and design. This paper is a contribution to the debate. The paper derives design criteria for peer review mechanisms after looking at some functioning examples. These criteria are—competence, independence and competition. It is argued that, while the APRM is a welcome addition to pan‐African institutional structure, its design will have to be improved for it to be truly successful. First, APRM should greatly narrow the scope of its reviews if it is to deliver competent assessments. Second NEPAD should devote significant resources to allow civil society in the reviewed country to do assessments of their own, and to critique the APRM assessment.

The survival of Nepad and the African peer review mechanism: A critical analysis

A lack of definition, poor communication and organisational weaknesses are damaging Nepad just as its most important venture — peer review — begins. The article asks how long Nepad can survive without robust delivery and plain talk about its future.

The African Peer Review Mechanism Under the African Union and Its Initiative: The New Partnership for Africa’s Development

The African Peer Review Mechanism Under the African Union and Its Initiative: The New Partnership for Africa’s Development

Promoting African 'Owned and Operated' Development: A Reflection on The New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD)

Abstract Though a very recent new African international regime spearheaded by the 'Renaissance' foreign policy of a Post Apartheid African leadership, Africa's New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) reflects important departures in 'African Affairs' policy, allowing for more integrated African development as well as for new forms of participation for the continent in the global economy.Nevertheless, while representing in theory and practice a long-standing debate across the continent on issues involving economic development and globalization, in 2001, during the incipient stages of NEPAD's establishment, the general sentiment toward its goal as a continental 'self reliant' path to development – 'owned' by Africans – was heavily criticized by African policy analysts. The criticism charged that because NEPAD followed a development strategy that relied on global capital and dependent development, its objectives were doomed to fail despite the document's pan nationalistic intentions.The current article explores the extent to which NEPAD's ideological vision to combine collective political nationalism ushered in by the African Renaissance with economic globalization is plausible and achievable as a viable and realizable response to the world's poorest continent's millennium development goals. The article further analyzes the intellectual roots of NEPAD's G-8 induced African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) revealing the shortcomings of approaching African development from the global hegemony of democracy and good governance.The article thus concludes alternatively that NEPAD's winning strategy may come from the development blueprint's emerging status as a continental regional institution driven by a renewed pan Africanist ideology.

THE AFRICAN PEER REVIEW MECHANISM

The African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) is perhaps the most innovative aspect of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD). For the APRM to serve its full potential, it is important that the application of the peer review process meet the criteria of credibility, integrity and professionalism. This paper sets out clarifications by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) on the nature and content of the APRM process. However, we first offer a brief summary of the concept and international experience related to peer reviews as best practice for the APRM.

MAKING THE MECHANISM WORK

The New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) is an African Union (AU) mandated programme. The African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) is at the heart of the AU's drive for a broad vision of African rejuvenation and renewal that encompasses peace, security, governance issues, socio-economic development and regional co-operation and reconstruction. This mission impresses upon us the need to put our house in order as a basis for auto-centered development and as a framework for productive engagement with the rest of the international community. The two objectives are intertwined.