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| How NEPAD can engage with Poverty Reduction Strategies: Developing an appropriate framework |
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2. NEPAD's Solutions to Africa's Underdevelopment and Poverty
- The proposed solutions are nothing but a mere replica of the elements of the Washington
Consensus driven by the IFIs under an African dressing.
NEPAD fails to learn from the past drastic effects of the IFIs's polices particularly the IMF and World Bank's macroeconomic prescriptions for economic recovery like Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) and market-based approaches to economic growth. Its focus on the private sector as the engine of growth falls short of realistic solutions to resolve the discrepancy between sound macroeconomic policies and sound sustainable development. African economies have increasingly become highly vulnerable to the disproportionate power of large transnational companies that maximize their advantage when they invest, typically taking very little account of the economic, social and environmental impacts of their activities.
- NEPAD is very clear with whom new partnerships should be sought and quite vague on what type of partnerships Africa should be struck with the rest of the world. It is important not to forget that Africa is already in some form of partnership with the North except that the current partnership is characterised by hypocrisy on the part of the developed countries, a 'win-lose' approach through unequal power imbalances clearly depicted in the unequal trading relations between the developed and the developing world, in resolving Africa's debt crisis, and the many conflicts and wars around the continent. For sure the type of new partnership NEPAD is looking for is embodied within the World Bank's 'comprehensive development framework', which implies that specific conditionalities will continue being linked to ODA and debt reduction. Such conditionalities not only impose measures that are detrimental to the poor, they also endanger national sovereignty and ultimate goal of vertical accountability of elected African leaders to citizens.
A more focus analysis and linkage of NEPAD and poverty reduction strategies entails looking at the key issues of aid, debt and trade which have a direct impact on poverty reduction and sustainable development.
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