Africa Braces to Become Global Growth Pole, Agrees Most Solutions Must Come from Within
By NewsfromAfrica
Addis Ababa – African Ministers of Finance, Planning and Development have said that their countries will seize the opportunity provided by developments in the global economy and turn the region into a pole for global growth, underlying their determination to find home-grown solutions for that transition.
Closing the 5th Joint Annual Meetings of the AU Conference of Ministers of Economy and Finance and ECA Conference of African Ministers of Finance, Planning and Economic Development, some 50 ministers from 37 countries adopted a series of measures that their countries would need to implement to achieve the goal.
According to the statement, the ministers recognise “the opportunities, potentialities and challenges for our continent to become a pole of global growth” and commit to promote and implement “holistic, coordinated and integrated policy approaches and mixes to help unleash balanced and sustainable growth and the development potential of our countries at the local, national and regional levels.”
Although the region’s progress could either be hampered or fostered by external factors such as the escalation of the recent euro zone sovereign debt crisis and the continuation of the global financial and economic crisis, the statement focuses mostly on what can, and should be done by African themselves.
In this respect, the ministerial statement engages countries to strengthen individual and collective leadership and capacities to grasp evolving local and global opportunities in order to speed up the attainment of development and transformation in Africa.
The statement takes note of on-going regional integration programmes across Africa and urges the promotion of mutually beneficial intra-African and South-South cooperation, including facilitating efforts towards mainstreaming the Action Plan for Boosting Intra-African Trade.
It says there is need to support measures to strengthen participation by young people and women in wage employment and widening their access and opportunities in the labour market; and accelerating measures designed to radically curb child and maternal mortality in Africa.
Focusing on the need for implementation which has often been a challenge to many African countries, the ministers undertook to accelerate the scale up and implementation of different existing regional and global commitments and initiatives that are compatible the vision of a “transformed continent that is able to serve as a pillar of global growth”, according to the statement.
It also insists on the implementation of the Road Map and Architecture for fast-tracking the Continental Free Trade Area, as well as various ancillary initiatives, such as the Minimum Integration Programme and the Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa.
Participants and experts agree that although Africa still has a number of challenges to overcome, prospects for the region are actually good enough to turn things around, especially if current growth rates are sustained for another decade or two.