Using ICT for gender advocacy

The final paragraph of the lengthy consensus statement issued at the end of the Sixth African Development Forum, which makes the valid point about using ICT to better effect, caught my KI eye: "Establishing sound data on all aspects of gender equality, women's empowerment and violence against women and girls is a necessary precondition for establishing the best policies and monitoring the effectiveness of actions. Data also include the life stories of women and girls who are survivors of violence and exploitation. In addition to being collected, it is equally vital that data are analyzed, disseminated and used as the basis for designing and implementing programmes and monitoring and evaluating activities. ICT should be used for better dissemination of data. All member states and partners should cooperate in strengthening the African Gender and Development Index developed by the ECA and building capacities and strengthening systems for collection, analysis, dissemination and use of sex- and gender-disaggregated data. The AU, ECA and ADB should jointly publish a regular report, “The State of Africa's Women” based on these data." It is easy to make such calls; the hard work lies in doing it!

Regional integration: Botswana and South Africa fight it out

I do not attempt to understand all the issues around EPAs, in particular how they are going to reshape regional integration in Africa. But with the huge financial transfers involved in SACU getting more press coverage in South Africa, largely driven by the National Treasury and the Department of Trade and Industry, it is clear that the "regional" project in our part of the world is in deep trouble: an article in yesterday's Sunday Standard, published in Botswana, revealed all the antagonisms between South Africa and Botswana around the EPA with the EU. Bitter stuff! I have posted the article in today's selection of newsflashes on the FANRPAN website, hoping that it will get some wider circulation in the region.

New poverty and inequality data from Namibia and Tanzania

New poverty and inequality statistics were released this week in Namibia and Tanzania. Are they pointing to different trends across the countries? In Tanzania, a local newspaper reported the Deputy Minister for Finance and Economic Affairs as saying that income poverty at the household level has significantly decreased among Tanzanians over the past six years. A "significant segment" of the local population who could not afford basic needs had gone down to 33.2 per cent - from 35.7 per cent between 2001 and 2007. Studies had also shown that food availability was also rising: some 19 out of 100 people in 2007 were able to cater for their food needs as compared to 16 out of 100 people in 2001. The deputy minister was speaking during an official opening of a three-day consultative meeting on a National Strategy for Growth and Reduction of Poverty (NSGRP) and Public Expenditure Review (PER).

Namibia: Almost a third - 28% - of Namibian households are now classified as poor, with 13% labelled as severely poor, according to the latest review of poverty and inequality (reports The Namibian). The most telling result of the new report is its identification of education as a critical factor in addressing poverty. Among Namibians with no formal education, 50% were found to be poor and 26,7% severely poor.The situation shows improvement as education levels rise, with 12.6% of those who finished high school classified as poor and 5.1% as severely poor. The guest speaker at the launch, United Nations Resident Co-ordinator Simon Nhongo, said the new report shows a threefold increase in the number of severely poor households compared to the previous year. This steep rise is however attributed to a change in methodology. Previously, the official poverty line was defined using a household's relative expenditure on food compared to its total expenditure. The new method, which the Bureau says has become more widely used in the SADC region and other developing countries, is called the Cost of Basic Needs (CBN) approach.

Information, regional integration and policy making in SADC

Regional integration issues featured strongly in a recent call by Professor Peter Katjavivi, Director General of the Namibian National Planning Commission, for improved dialogue between researchers and SADC governments: the call was made at a gathering of SADC universities hosted by the University of Namibia.

"Such a dialogue or forum would address several issues that hamper the exchange of ideas and knowledge among social scientists and policy makers and prevent cooperation between these two players in the national development process," he said. On the one hand policy makers have difficulties in accessing reliable,relevant and efficient information based on empirical social science research. "Quite often one may find contradictory evidence being provided that leaves the policy maker in a dilemma as to which line of thinking is actually correct," he cautioned.

On the other hand, social science researchers may point to the low funding for research in our countries and other difficulties of doing research on public policies, including a somewhat hostile environment when it comes to accessing some categories of government data, where rules of confidentiality predominate even for some essentially
harmless types of information. "This can be the culture of government information systems in some of our ministries and departments, and we need to revisit it in order to create an environment of a free flow of information. Continuing dialogue is one way forward to create mutual trust and responsibility," he said, calling for a common agenda between social science researchers and policy makers in Southern Africa, in order to
strengthen the framework of evidence based policy making and also relevance in social science research.

"This will bring about improved strategic thinking that will inform policies and accelerated national development programming. Since some of the delegates to this seminar are from other countries of Southern Africa, the issue of regional integration is also an important one – because that is one way of countering some of the negative outcomes of globalization," he said. Policy making also takes place at the regional level, and has a bearing on national policies. Social Science research in Southern Africa, therefore, should also focus on issues of regional integration to resolve some of the problems and issues concerned with the creation of common markets – SACU, SADC, COMESA and, finally, an AU-wide common market. However, empirical research is needed into issues such as competitiveness, migration and free movement of people, and of course what we witnessed a few months ago, xenophobia and intolerance of immigrants," he said.

AU/ECA: Assessing regional integration report

The ink was hardly dry on my other post today when this article from the Daily Monitor in Addis popped into the inbox: A new report on monetary and financial integration in Africa will be released this week by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) jointly with the African Union. The report finds that "African countries are experiencing enormous difficulties in achieving the desired macroeconomic convergence criteria set by Regional Economic Communities (RECs)". The report indicates that the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa (CEMAC) and West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA), among others, have done well in maintaining single digit inflation, but the remaining countries performed poorly partly due to negative external shocks, large budget deficit (external debt ratios as a percentage of GDP still remain as high as 70% in some countries), lack of reliable statistics and poor growth performance. The convergence criteria established by the Regional Economic Communities (RECs) include agreed targets such as budgetary balance, inflation and public debt.

ARIA III shows that regional economic communities exhibit considerable variation relative to both the overall trend and its components. Country performance also varies considerably. On the whole, the report demonstrates that Africa's regional economic communities have done better at controlling inflation and budget deficits. It also notes that they have not done so well at reducing external debt. Economic growth rates are also generally encouraging across Africa. Integration blocs that already exist as monetary unions tend to do better in terms of macroeconomic policy convergence. Overall, African countries are making tremendous efforts towards sound macro-economic policy convergence in areas including inflation, budget deficits, and economic growth rates. A number of RECs are also actively promoting step-by-step approaches towards monetary and financial integration within their communities or sub-regions. The report is rich in examples of such laudable programs and efforts.

As a major recommendation, ARIA III points to the need for African countries to mainstream regional monetary and macroeconomic objectives in their national development strategies. The report calls upon national authorities to have a clear sense of their own development objectives. "They should be more responsible in macroeconomic policy making and set their own priorities for exchange rates, fiscal policies and interest rates", says the report in conclusion.

Towards a network of regional integration networks?

Regional integration is, ostensibly, one of the new buzz words across Africa. I say ostensibly because it would appear that while almost everyone accepts that it is a good idea, the political and economic practicalities of moving towards closer regional integration are huge. Be that as it may (or not), a lengthy concept note (45pages) prepared for the recent Conference of Ministers of Public/Civil Service deserves to be widely read: the document examined the links between RECs and the African Public Service Ministers' Programme. The slew of recommendations included the need for a virtual Centre on African Governance Reform and an African Integration Forum; the latter would function as a civil society initiative for promoting NGO and private sector dialogue with African governments on regional cooperation and integration issues. I have posted the paper on the ANSA-Africa website, in the general section.

Countdown to the next APF meeting

Addis is the venue for next week's meeting of the African Partnership Forum - the vehicle for liaison between the AU/Nepad and the G8/OECD. One discussion document has already been posted on the APF website - a perspective on carbon finance in Africa. Transparency seems to rule when it comes to posting discussion documents from the meetings! The previous APF meeting, held in Japan, discussed a range of documents, including climate change and ICT issues. The two ICT-related documents drew my attention, given my KI lens. The AU/Nepad Africa Action plan is also worth a look at. An updated version will be presented in Addis.

Of fleabites and aid exit

"A year, in the timescale of international development, is barely a fleabite": so began today's Guardian editorial on Katine. Apologies for returning to it but I do like the reflective nature of the reporting and commentary on the project's interactions with the Ugandan community they have chosen to help. It marks a change from dry donor-speak about "sustainability". But we have to take the latter seriously because donors do choose to disengage from projects they initiated (often too soon it seems to me). On this theme, the Christian Michelsen Institute in Norway was commissioned by a consortium of Nordic donors to review issues around donor exit: their report dealt with projects in Botswana, Malawi, Eritrea, South Africa and India. It has just been published on the Sida website.

KI work and African agriculture

I spend a very rewarding hour or so in the evenings sourcing material for the FANRPAN website's newsflash section. My preference is for material published in the southern Africa media which illustrates the complexities of increasing agricultural production in the SADC region. Debates on land tenure and ownership, the impact of climate change, the impact of fertiliser subsidies and the such like are posted. It is lonely work. But the thought that the RSS facility allows my editorial judgements to reach a wider audience, hopefully connected in some way to policy debates, more than compensates. I think of it also as getting these subscribers "to read off the same page". The recent conference in Addis Ababa on maximising the impact of agricultural research seemed to have little to say on this personal interest. It was more concerned with conventional research outputs. But still worth a read! Take a look at the FANRPAN contribution by Francis Hale.

More on Katine

I am pleased to see that the Katine Project will shortly be the focus of a public debate at ODI - we need to hear a bit more about it beyond living off the superb project website hosted by The Guardian, one of the project's sponsors. Madeleine Bunting, who will be speaking at the ODI event, wrote a very reflective piece this week reviewing the first year of the project's anticipated three year lifespan. A few lines in a blog cannot do justice to her comments; read the article! But one turn of phase can be quoted: rural Africa is a graveyard cluttered with projects launched on idealism and ignorance... I look forward to reading a good summary of the debate.

Kenya Knowledge Network

Afrique en Ligne continues to pick up some gems: the latest being the launch last week of the Kenya Knowledge Network as an e-forum to debate development policy processes in Kenya. The process is intended to support ongoing debates around budget formulation, parliamentary perspectives and the proceedings of the National Economic and Social Council. Supported by the African Capacity Building Foundation, KNET's launch mirrors similar knowledge portals in five other African countries, including Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Ghana and Senegal.

Namibia's BIG experiment

The Millenium Villages (spread across a number of African countries) and the Katine Project in Uganda grab the headlines, analysis and reviews when it comes to debating the success of village or community level development interventions. But the outcome of a similar sort of experiment in Namibia is less well known. It pits (enthusiastic) civil society advocates of a Basic Income Grant against (cautious) researchers at Nepru, one of the most respected economic and development institutes in Namibia. At issue is just how much the BIG intervention can claim in terms of changing people's lives in the town of Otjivero. The debate is playing itself out in the Namibian press but a new article in IRIN should draw more African and international attention to the process. The debate is far from over. The experiment should be more widely watched, especially in South Africa where a vocal BIG lobby exists. An easy way to follow the press debates in Namibia is to use "Nepru, BIG" as google news search key words!