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considerably analysed and we have a relatively good idea of what weneed to do but it is in respect of the how it can be done that we haveconsiderably fallen short.The 2005 UN World Summit provided broad guidance in this regard.World leaders reaffirmed that “each country must take primary responsibilityfor its own development” and must “adopt and implementcomprehensive national development strategies to achieve theinternationally agreed development goals and objectives, includingthe Millennium Development Goals.” The technical challenge here isto define the appropriate mix of comprehensive development strategiesfor each of our countries. This is not easy. What we must dois to identify, ameliorate, and attenuate the binding constraints onaction.In other words, beyond the technical challenge of working out themix of policies, costing the interventions, and the like, there is thechallenge of understanding and concurrently putting in place measuresto attenuate or mitigate the possible unintended adverse effectsof scaling up. Let me illustrate what I mean with a simple example:Consider the scaling up of infrastructure – say roads – to improve accessof the poor to social services and markets. Without a doubt anew or upgraded road to a food producing region can, by improvingaccess to markets, raise incomes and help reduce poverty. However,there may be unintended consequences such as rural-urban migration,which would need to be addressed at the same time. Thereis thus a challenge to come up with innovative schemes to managethese tensions. We need to scale up, but in a manner that is not onlyinter-temporally sustainable but that also takes account of possibleunintended consequences.Scaling up public sector investments depends critically on scaling upfinancing. The Monterrey Consensus on Financing for Developmentprovides a strong framework for mobilising resources to meet theMDGs. There has been some progress in this regard. Foreign directinvestment to our region is going up; and the G8 Multilateral DebtRelief Initiative (MDRI) presents hope that the debt problem of manycountries will soon be finally resolved. On the domestic front, countriesare intensifying efforts to increase domestic resource mobilisation.Countries are beginning to manage revenues from their naturalresources better. There is however a lot still to be done on trade.12 Part One

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