A Decade of NEPAD - Economic Commission for Africa - uneca

20 A Decade of NEPAD: Deepening African Private Sector and Civil Society Ownership and Partnership
The Initiative’s work has helped NEPAD countries to improve
the investment related content of the African Peer
Review Mechanism and to enhance their capacities to
implement investment climate reforms in sensitive areas
such as water and transport infrastructure.
The Initiative is guided by a Steering Committee chaired by
the NEPAD CEO with Vice-Chairs from South Africa and
Japan and composed of all major NEPAD actors, OECD
countries and donors, RECs, the NEPAD Business Group,
the NEPAD Business Foundation, the African Partnership
Forum, OECD Development Assistance Committee, the
Investment Climate Facility, the World Bank, UNCTAD
and other partner organizations.
The Initiative has served as a facilitator of region-wide dialogues
on investment facility and will between 2009-2011
G8 Support
The Group of 8 was initially established in 1975 as an annual
meeting of the major industrial democracies of the
world to discuss relevant economic and political matters
facing their domestic societies and the broader international
community as a whole. The original meeting was
comprised of six countries France, Germany, Italy, Japan,
the United Kingdom and the U.S. In 1985, Canada joined
the meeting and in 2006 Russia became a formal member
after serving as an observer state from 1991-1998.
The founders of NEPAD presented the Africa Action Plan
to the G8 countries for the first time at the G8 Summit
in Canada in July 2002 developing what became the G8
Africa Action Plan.
At the G8 meeting in Evian, France the following year, it
was decided to extend the dialogue between the G8 and
NEPAD to all of the member countries of the OECD that
contribute substantially to development assistance. As a
Bretton Woods Institution Support
In July 1944, following the end of World War II, a United
Nations Monetary and Financial Conference was convened
in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in the U.S. Out of
this historic gathering of 44 nations came the mandate
to establish the International Monetary Fund and the
begin to go further and focus on PFI-based peer reviews in
pilot countries using two OECD tools: the OECD Principles
for Private Sector Participation in Infrastructure, as the
basis for policy frameworks for regional infrastructure
investment, and the OECD Risk Awareness Tool, the basis
of multi-stakeholder dialogue on doing business in weak
governance zones.
In addition to the NEPAD-OECD Africa Investment Initiative,
since 2000 the Development Centre of the OECD, in
conjunction with the African Development Bank Group
and the Economic Commission for Africa, has published
the African Economic Outlook, an annual detailed analytical
guide on Africa’s economies, their economic performance,
challenges, and opportunities.
result, in November of 2003, the Africa Partnership Forum
was established. 14
In 2005, at the 31 st G8 Summit held in Gleneagles, Scotland
in the U.K., in support of NEPAD, the G8 members
pledged to double their current aid commitments by 2010.
In practice this meant that given their current pledges of
slightly more than US$25 billion, the G8 members pledged
to raise their ODA pledges to roughly $54.5 billion in 2010,
which would translate into an annual increase of 17% per
annum between 2007 and 2010. 15 Half of this aid was to
be earmarked to support Africa’s development.
Through their ODA contributions and their on-going
participation in the Africa Partnership Forum, the G8
members have continued to support the implementation
of NEPAD.
14 www.africapartnershipforum.org
15 African Economic Outlook 2009, African Development Bank and
OECD, p. 33
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development,
or the World Bank.