May 19, 2005
Sussex, United Kingdom
The Commission for Africa is a major U.K.-driven effort to both analyze Africa's problems and push for a major new international effort to support Africa. It has made a major effort to include both African institutions (notably NEPAD) and a steering committee of distinguished Africans, including, for example, the heads of state of Ethiopia and Tanzania.
The meeting, organized by Wilton Park in the beautiful Sussex countryside, was an exchange-of-views and next steps meeting, involving a range of U.K. groups and agencies (U.K. and African). Michael Walton was asked to present the WDR on equity, and sought to draw links with the work of the Commission. There were a range of other presenters, including Nick Stern on the Commission report. Three points to highlight from the discussion:
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Governance. Where the WDR team uses concepts of political equality and institutions, the Commission uses the language of governance. They argue that governance is a sine qua non of any African take-off--and more than some of the headlines, the message is that without this, money won't have much impact.
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Aid. There was useful discussion on how the initial doubling of aid could make sense in weak institutional environments, and how this squared with the Commission's argument against conditionality. (A link between more aid and stronger horizontal accountabilities, e.g. from parliaments, and more tax collection is a possibility). The view was that a lot of African governments were moving in the right direction, and the way to move was to get aid resources behind such moves; the report also argues for greater tax effort, but this will take time.
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Big push. There's a spirit of big push: in education, in health (with really big numbers), and in infrastructure. This is analytically and practically interesting and challenging. This is surely attractive if it can be managed, but magnifies challenges of interactions with weak governance.
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