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Africa's woes under microscope
02/06/2003 08:46 - (SA)
Nairobi - Finance ministers from across Africa gather in the Ethiopian capital this week for the the 38th annual meeting of the African Development Bank group (ADB), where attention will focus on easing the economic woes of the world's poorest continent.
The three-day meeting beginning on Tuesday will take place against the backdrop of a summit of the world's richest nations, which has been meeting in the French Alpine resort of Evian.
The Addis Ababa meeting brings together the bank group's board of directors, who are finance ministers from 53 African and 24 other nations. They will evaluate and approve perfomance in the past year, as well as lay the groundwork for future operations.
Although beset by the perennial weights of bad governance, conflict and the HIV/Aids pandemic and more recently burdened by numerous alerts of terrorist threats, Africa received a relatively optimist report from the Internationnal Monetary Fund (IMF) this year.
The IMF's World Economic Outlook, released in April, said Africa was holding up well to the global downturn, and predicted growth of 3.9% this year, down from the 4.2% predicted last September, but significantly better than the 3.4% growth recorded last year.
"Gross domestic product growth in Africa remained relatively resilient to the global downturn," the report said, predicting 5.2% growth next year.
Africa's buoyant output is a reflection of "improved macro-economic policies and stability, progress in resolving regional conflicts, rising commodity prices, and debt relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative", the Washington-based lending institution said.
The HIPC initiative is a joint World Bank and IMF scheme drawn up in 1996 to help ease the debt burden for the world's poorest countries.
However, the IMF also warned that some African states were mismanaging rich mineral reserves that could otherwise deliver a significant boost to their economies.
"Macro-economic management of Africa's substantial natural resource endowments - which have contributed far less than they should have to Africa's social and economic development - remains a concern," it said.
Taking Africa's growing population into account, this year's expected growth would be closer to 2.0%, the IMF added.
The political crisis in Cote d'Ivoire had serious implications for the country and its neighbours, while lower oil output in Nigeria - where unrest has forced the closure of some production facilities in the Niger Delta region - had already contributed to a slowing of growth in the region last year.
On Monday - a day before the meeting opens to evaluate the group's performance over the last year and plan future operations - a symposium will examine the continent's progress on poverty reduction, social development and Millennium Development Goals, which aim to phase out poverty from africa by 2015.
The meeting will assess the progress, if any, of New Partnership for Africa Development (Nepad), an home-grown initiative of several African heads of state born in 2001, with the aim of hauling the continent out of its socio-economic and political turmoil, attracting investment and to generally make Africa more self-dependent. - Sapa-AFP
- SAPA
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