The New Partnership for Africa’s Development

INTRODUCTION

The main objective of the paper is to discuss in detail origins and objectives of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) together with the major problems and challenges facing it. Firstly, a historic background of the partnership will be looked at which will address the origins and objectives part. Secondly, there shall be a discussion of the successes, then the major problems together with the challenges facing the partnership. It will be after this that a set of recommendations will be set before finally looking into the conclusion of the paper.

The period after colonialism has seen Africa with an unsettled socio-economic growth history. The hopeful take-off observed during the 1960s was short lived. The growth was disturbed by the 1973 oil crisis. The effect of the oil crisis was more severe in Africa than in other developing regions. Close to a half of the states in Africa experienced bad per capital growth rates during the period of the crisis to the 1980s. It was during this period that marked the beginning of the debt crisis. According to Donald Chimanikire, new long-term borrowings by African countries south of the Sahara increased from US $3 billion in 1976 to US $11, 5 billion in 1980 (Chimanikire,2007). This indicates that there has been an overall growth on the borrowings by African states hence the debt crisis.

The state of affairs worsened very rapidly during the 1980s leading some observers and analysys to refer to the 1980s as “the lost decade.” As reported in African Development, a Comparative

Perspective published by UNCTAD in 1998, “Africa …. failed to adjust to a more hostile external environment characterized by terms-of-trade deterioration, sharp increases in international interest...

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...th African President Thabo Mbeki and launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2001. Second on the list is the Omega Plan, by the President of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade, and presented to the Conference of Francophone African leaders in January 2001 in Cameroon, and the third and last of these, The Compact for African Recovery instigated by the then Executive Secretary of ECA, K.Y. Amoako, in response to a mandate by African Ministers of Finance in late 2000.

All three initiatives have a common goal in growing the speed and impact of Africa’s development. While these initiatives have common features, there were also differences reflecting the regional and other biases of the originators. Compromises had to be made in order to merge the three proposals into one initiative. NEPAD thus reflects the compromises involved in arriving at a single initiative.