RENEWAL PROCESS BEGINS FOR ECONOMIC COMMISSION FOR AFRICA AS MEETING OF EXPERTS CONCLUDES IN ADDIS ABABA
Press Release
ECA/669
RENEWAL PROCESS BEGINS FOR ECONOMIC COMMISSION FOR AFRICA AS MEETING OF EXPERTS CONCLUDES IN ADDIS ABABA
19960130 ADDIS ABABA, 25 January (UN Information Service) -- The renewal of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) as a think tank for development began this week at a meeting of high-level African development experts and activists who considered new strategic directions for the Commission. The meeting endorsed ECA's new and sharper programme focus, with a strategy that will concentrate on five major programme areas and three cross-cutting themes.The Commissions's Bureau of African ministers, who helped mediate the debate and endorsed the experts' recommendations, will take the message to the annual Conference of Ministers -- ECA's ratifying board of all African member States -- to be held in Addis Ababa in May. The Bureau's current Chairman, Ethiopia's Economic Cooperation and Development Minister, Girma Birru, said his Government was delighted with the renewal process and impressed by the initiatives of ECA's leadership.
The two-day consultative meeting on strategic directions for ECA was called by its new head, Executive Secretary K.Y. Amoako, as the latest in a series of consultations began last year, which included in-house town hall meetings at the Addis headquarters and consultant surveys. Those, Mr. Amoako told the high-level experts, had empowered him to lay strategic guidelines before them, as the framework for the debate. And his first task after meeting with the Bureau would be to report back to an Africa Hall gathering of all staff, on the success of the consultative meeting.
Mr. Amoako moved from the World Bank in Washington four months ago to head the ECA. He noted in his address to the meeting that ECA reforms were part of a broader stream of change in the United Nations family, but stressed that "we at ECA see our reforms as our own, because ours is a response to Africa's special needs -- and Africa needs this institution". He added that discussions with many people in and out of the United Nations, including its major shareholders, indicated "they want ECA to succeed".
Mr. Amoako affirmed that gender would be moved to the mainstream in ECA's programming and future in-house operations. "I am committed to this issue", he said, quoting Beijing Women's Conference Secretary-General Gertrude Mongella, who had just challenged the Addis meeting, saying "How can we develop, as long as most of our water is carried on our women's heads? How long will their heads, and their backs, be our main transport"?
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The biggest single challenge ahead was to make ECA communications more effective, Mr. Amoako said. Information for development was one of the five focus areas, he noted, "but it is also an area that links and lights up everything we do. It illustrates the way we should be acting, as you have recommended, both as a centre of excellence in policy analysis and guidance to member States, and as an effective disseminator of development information".
Mr. Amoako highlighted the way ECA had already taken the lead in electronic networking of information, helping to launch e-mail nodes, and training operators in more than 30 African countries. He said ECA was already encouraging member Sstates to liberalize telecommunications so they could be geared for the information age, not pushed aside by it. He also noted the vital importance of partnerships with other agencies for effective work, in information and the other four chosen programme areas, which are: economic and social policy analysis; food security; development management; and promoting regional cooperation.
The next major step in ECA's renewal process will be a special meeting of partners, in Addis Ababa in March, including United Nations agencies, Bretton Woods institutions, major bilaterals and foundations, and representatives of some east Asian governments. That will be a broad forum about how they could collaborate with ECA to achieve its strategic objectives. Also, the ECA Executive Secretary is co-charing, with the Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the steering committee for the United Nations Special Initiative on Africa. That was the first time that major United Nations actions would focus on Africa, with $24 billion to be used over a decade for basic needs and peace-building, much of it to be mobilized under the leadership of the World Bank. The Special Initiative would be jointly launched, before mid-year, from ECA in Addis Ababa and United Nations Headquarters in New York.
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