Africa in the Post-2015 Development Agenda

A Geographical Perspective

Leo Charles Zulu, Cristina D'Alessandro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351658416
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica africana

This book offers a multifaceted examination of Africa's development into the post-2015 global agenda from a geographical perspective. As a diversified and highly applied discipline, geography has a lot to offer to global debates, nuanced analysis of problems on and the search for innovative solutions to advance the African development agenda beyond 2015. The end of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) era and the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in September 2015 mark an important turning point for Africa and an opportune time to examine new challenges and opportunities that it faces. The regional disparities in MDG progress affirm an important geographic tenet that the unique yet internally differentiated socio-cultural, economic, political, ecological, biophysical and historical context give Africa distinctive challenges and opportunities that demand particular approaches to development. This edited book presents innovative contributions examining Africa's development performance in diverse sectors during the MDG era as a basis for understanding prospects for its development in the SDG era and beyond. It offers new and innovative study perspectives and methodological approaches on urban transformation, development financing, food security, climate change, gender equality, health, and regional integration, among other topics, and useful insights for scholars, students and development practitioners. This book was originally published as a special issue of African Geographical Review, the journal of the American Association of Geographers' Africa Specialty Group, to mark the transition from MDGs to SDGs.

Advancing African agency in the new 2030 transformative development agenda

Hany Besada, Jiajun Xu, Annalise Mathers and Richard Carey

This paper explores the current transition from the MDG framework to the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) framework in the post-2015 development agenda, with specific emphasis on how the SDGs with their aim of ‘Transforming our World’ might guide economic development and policy in Africa. The aim is to investigate the scope and implications of the post-MDG Agenda for Africa against the background of distinct disparities in development progress across the African continent, rapid urbanization, the availability of new technologies, and the emergence of parallel comprehensive new frameworks for managing global climate change and for creating synergies between China’s transformation over the coming decades and Africa’s Agenda 2063. Drawing on the changing shape of development finance and new insights into the role of public entrepreneurship for development, we make proposals for advancing African agency in the context of these new frameworks, and conclude with policy recommendations for the future.

1. Introduction

In this introduction, we first look at the significance of the transition from the MDGs to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted at UN Heads of State level in September 2015 and examine the question of African agency in each of these frameworks, past and future. Section 2 of the paper looks at African performance under the MDGs; Section 3 sets out the changing landscape of development finance and what that implies for African agency, while Section 4 attempts to identify the rationale for African agency in a world where the case for an effective, proactive state that creates markets, capacities, and incentives interacting closely with private sector agents has gained ground. This new paradigm of public entrepreneurship replaces the paradigm of a limited state, passively relying on market-determined incentives associated with the Washington Consensus, and still widely applied in the form of regulatory approaches to improve enabling environments.

We then set out some conclusions and recommendations geared to the role of African agency in the context of the transformation paradigm embodied in the SDGs and the African Union’s Agenda 2063, the ambitions embodied in the outcome document from the sixth summit meeting of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC, 2015), held in Johannesburg in December 2015, and the comprehensive framework for applying non-market measures and special financial-, technology- and capacity-building mechanisms embodied in the Paris Agreement on managing climate change, as concluded in December 2015.

The United Nations (UN) Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have served as the preeminent focus of international development efforts for the past 15 years. The aim of the MDGs was to create a development framework focused on improving health, education, and gender equality among the poorest people, and halving the incidence of absolute poverty while arresting environmental degradation by 2015, with a set of eight time-oriented goals, each with numerical indicators. With the MDG framework coming to conclusion at the end of 2015, the 17 new (SDGs) (see below) that form the UN 2030 Agenda for Global Development under the title of ‘Transforming our World’ mark a new era of global development strategy beginning in 2016. They apply to all nations, developed and developing, bridging governments, civil society, and the private sector to create innovative ways to achieve sustainable development while ‘leaving no-one behind.’

This transition comes at a crucial time. Lingering inequalities remain, and this is particularly apparent on the African continent, where many countries will not have achieved the MDG targets by the end of 2015 (UNECA, AfDB, & UNDP, 2015; von der Hoeven, 2012). For example, despite reducing the proportion of people living on less than US$1.25 a day from almost 57% in 1990 to just under 47% in 2013 across most of Africa, this remains over 20% below the international target (United Nations Development Programme, 2014).

The MDGs were drawn from among the hundreds of goals set in UN conferences over the decades previous to the new millennium. While their precise form was the product of a limited circle of policy-makers, the key act of leadership that led to their adoption by world leaders as the common reference point for development efforts was provided by the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who launched a major interagency report in July 2000 entitled ‘A Better World for All’ and worked to incorporate the goals into the Millennium Declaration emerging from the UN General Assembly at Heads of State level in September 2000. In order to get to that point, Kofi Annan had to face down strong initial opposition from the World Council of Churches.¹

Subsequently, when the MDGs and their indicators were fully specified by an expert group in 2001, Kofi Annan worked energetically to promote the dissemination and follow-up processes. Thus, an eminent African was at the center of the whole MDG endeavor, which served to promote the cause of poverty-reducing development at global summit levels, in national policy-making, and across the NGO community. One major international policy response was the significant debt reduction effort by bilateral creditors and the multilateral development institutions, notably the World Bank and the IMF. Sub-Saharan Africa was a major beneficiary of this effort.

While the MDGs did succeed in establishing the value of a global development framework, they were also the subject of much debate and criticism on the grounds of their abstraction from the wide range of development levels, setting up African countries for failure in terms of the global goals, even if their human development progress was rapid. Further, this critique argues that the MDGs were taken over by global policy interests which linked growth and poverty reduction to aid levels and processes rather than to more fundamental domestic and global issues and actors (Easterly, 2009; Vandemoortele, 2009). Other critics accepted the validity of the MDG framework but found that the widely broadcast narratives around African growth and governance failures are overly pessimistic, built on poor statistics and faulty methodologies, compounded by neglect of the historical episodes of economic growth and decline, and associated political trends, which in fact were closely related to global economic fluctuations (Bates, 2008, Jerven, 2015).

Current notions of ‘Africa on the rise’ may, on the other hand, be over-optimistic (Jerven, 2015). Another reading is that Africa is indeed an existential category in the world, marked by endemic economic and political failures, requiring sustained engagement on its place in the global order, based on social relations of membership, responsibility, and equality at the planetary level (Ferguson, 2006).

The question of how African agency in the form of national and regional initiatives and capacities might be strengthened vis-a-vis vs. external narratives, policy paradigms, and resources is intrinsic to these critiques. In fact, over the 15 years of the MDG international development cooperation regime, African agency grew in strength. The formation of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) in 2001 was the outcome of initiatives from the presidents of South Africa, Senegal, and Algeria, built around the theme of an African renaissance and facilitated by the Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, KY Amoako (Amoako, in press). It became eventually a program of the African Union, which was launched in 2002 with the vision of ‘an integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa, driven by its own citizens and representing a dynamic force in the global arena.’ Progressively, annual meetings of Ministers of Finance and Planning jointly hosted by the UNECA, the AU, and the African Development Bank (AfDB) became major occasions for high-quality policy discussion and strategic thinking, with an Annual African Economic Report transferring debates about African development from the Bretton Woods institutions based around the Washington Consensus to African institutions meeting in African capitals, notably Addis Ababa.

An African Trade Policy Centre was established within the UNECA, supporting ministerial-level policy-making and engagement in international forums. The African Peer Review Mechanism was established to conduct reviews of governance in African countries, and a series of African Governance Reports was established under the UNECA. An annual African Economic Outlook is jointly published by the UNECA, the AfDB, the AU, and the OECD Development Centre. The NEPAD initiated and oversees a Common African Agricultural Development Policy. The African Union Commission, the NEPAD Secretariat, and the AfDB lead a Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA).

On aid policy, the 2008 Accra High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, hosted by the Ghanaian authorities, saw the formation of a Contact Group of Developing Countries under KY Amoako as a counterweight to the OECD donor group. The voice of the Contact Group grew in the following years and Talat Abdel Malek, a senior adviser to the Egyptian Minister of Development, was elected to the chairmanship of the OECD Working Party on Aid Effectiveness, in which position he presided over the 2011 Busan High Level Forum on Development Effectiveness which broadened the aid paradigm to include a much wider range of actors and financial flows (Abdel-Malek, 2015; Amoako, in press). The Consultative Group Meetings for developing country aid recipients (mainly African) held in Paris for many years throughout the 1980s and 1990s under the chairmanship of the World Bank gave way to country-based meetings chaired by African Ministers of Finance. The World Bank Special Programme for Africa, governed by a donor group, became the Strategic Partnership for Africa and then dissolved, supplanted by an African Platform for Development Effectiveness, coordinated by the NEPAD.²

For the preparation of a post-2015 development framework, a strong demand for a more inclusive, bottom-up, and comprehensive process inspired worldwide, multi-actor consultations feeding into an Open Working Group of the UN General Assembly. Drawing on the African capacities establish...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – From the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Africa in the post-2015 development Agenda. A geographical perspective
• 1. Advancing African agency in the new 2030 transformative development agenda
• 2. From global goals to regional strategies: towards an African approach to SDGs
• 3. Can using geographical factors leverage private equity to deliver sustainable development results?
• 4. Reproducing spaces of embeddedness through Islamic NGOs in Sub-Saharan Africa: reflections on the post-2015 development agenda
• 5. Engaging with and measuring informality in the proposed Urban Sustainable Development Goal
• 6. MDGs to SDGs – new goals, same gaps: the continued absence of urban food security in the post-2015 global development agenda
• 7. The SDG13 to combat climate change: an opportunity for Africa to become a trailblazer?
• 8. Gender equality as a means to women empowerment? Consensus, challenges and prospects for post-2015 development agenda in Africa
• 9. Defining and measuring water access: lessons from Tanzania for moving forward in the post-Millennium Development Goal era
• 10. Ecological sanitation: a sustainable goal with local choices. A case study from Taita Hills, Kenya
• 11. The Millennium Development Goals and Chinese involvement in French-speaking West Africa: which contributions for which issues?
• 12. Understanding the spatial context of sustainable urban health in Africa for the SDGs: Some lessons from the corridors of deprivation in Ilorin, Nigeria
• 13. The marginalization of walking, the Achilles’ heel of sustainable mobility policies in Oran (Algeria)
• Index