A Decade of NEPAD - Economic Commission for Africa - uneca

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64 A Decade of NEPAD: Deepening African Private Sector and Civil Society Ownership and Partnership voting processes, but still desire access to contribute to the work of the African Union. Many of these institutions also have doubts that their interests and concerns will not be adequately addressed through the elected country and regional ECOSOCC representatives. These two outcomes have led to the development, alongside ECOSOCC, of a primarily international CSO funded body called “The Centre for Citizens’ Participation in the African Union” (CCP-AU) 79 . CCP-AU initially began as a task force in 2007 and was established with the mandate of coordinating and facilitating the activities of AU interested Civil Society Organisations and to encourage others around the continent to become engaged with the AU processes. The aim of its founding organization’s (which included Action Aid – Ethiopia, African Center for Humanitarian Action (ACHA), African Rally for Peace and Development (ARPD), Afroflag Youth Vision (AYV), Christian Relief and Development Association (CRDA), Organization for Social Justice in Ethiopia (OSJE), and Oxfam) was to establish an institution that could serve as a platform to encourage the development of a people-centred African Union – where citizens have a say and can take matters into their own hands and influence decisions made within the AU that eventually will affect them. CCP-AU also was established with the aim of broadening and strengthening opportunities for a sustainable and significant engagement between civil society organisations and the African Union. The rationale behind the creation of the CCP-AU was multi-fold: ӹ There was a belief that there was yet untapped potential for African civil society organisations to become involved with the AU, as mandated by its constitutive act; ӹ There was as yet unmet desire for engagement with the AU amongst African CSOs; ӹ There were barriers to CSO engagement established by the AU, inadvertent or not; and ӹ There was a lack of an alternative established facilitating entity. Since its inception, the CCP-AU has taken steps to register its headquarters in Addis Ababa and already has facilitated a number of activities alongside AU programmes. The 79 See www.ccp-au.org CCP-AU planned and conducted the Third and Fourth Citizens’ Continental Conferences in Sharm El Sheik, Egypt and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, respectively. The Third Citizens Continental Conference was convened in June 2008 ahead of the 11 th Ordinary AU Summit under the Summit’s theme, “Meeting the Millennium Development Goals on Water and Sanitation”. Prior to this conference, the CCP-AU had organised and conducted a CSO training workshop from May 24-25 in Cairo, Egypt entitled “Understanding the AU and Seizing opportunities for Change” which was aimed at enhancing the knowledge and capacity of CSOs to engage the African Union on diverse issues affecting African citizenry. The Fourth Citizen’s Continental Conference was held at Addis Ababa on January 2009 where issues of social development and peace and security were discussed. As a groundbreaking initiative, CCP-AU launched a virtual working group project on March 5 th , 2009. The four working groups established include: 1) Institutional Reform, 2) Socio-Economic Issues, 3) AU Strategic Plan, and 4) International Justice and Universal Jurisdiction. 47 members have signed up to participate in the working group initiative. As the lead facilitator and supporter, the CCP-AU intends to further assist the working groups through identification and dissemination of documents, setting up and facilitating meeting dates and other lobbying opportunities, and coordinating face to face meetings with the AU Commission or providing support in other ways as requested. In June 2009, the CCP-AU held its Fifth Continental Conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia with the principal themes of the conference being agriculture, food security and financing for development in Africa, and peace, security and human rights in Africa. Furthermore, participants discussed various strategies to popularise the AU among African citizens and to identify and involve other stakeholders in engaging with the AU and its organs (i.e. the Pan African Parliament, the Economic, Social and Cultural Council, and the African Citizens Directorate, among others). Participants also agreed to put in place strategies to harmonise efforts of CCP-AU and other civil society organisations working on and with the AU.
To facilitate broader knowledge of developments within the AU by African CSOs and CSOs working in Africa, the CCP- AU also promotes the electronic newsletter the AU Monitor (www.pambazuka.org/aumonitor) which is produced by Fahamu, a non-profit organization founded in 1997 and headquartered in Oxford, UK with offices in Nairobi, Kenya; Dakar, Senegal; and Cape Town, South Africa. Recognizing that there has been a significant expansion in activity across the continent relating to participatory development, democracy and the promotion of improved governance, in 2005, the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa began a “rigorous analytical study” to determine what capacity gaps existed within African governance institutions. The research project had the further aim of making recommendations that would help enhance the capacity of the continent’s governance institutions. The results of the study were published in what has become a biennial study entitled the African Governance Report (AGR) 80 . AGR I, published in 2005, included 26 countries 81 in the research focus group and involved engaging a panel of national experts through surveys on a range of governance related issues. AGR II, published in 2009 82 , found that civil society in Africa has been a significant contributor to governance and development improvements in a number of countries in various areas of governance. The study also made a number of informative general assessments about civil society in Africa today. In part because the number of civil society organisations has grown rapidly since the transition to democracy in many African countries, and given improving capacity, AGR II experts found that the last five years have witnessed significantly increased effectiveness by CSOs. However, even while acknowledging that African CSOs capacity to identify and secure funding sources has improved, AGR II lamented the fact that most CSOs in Africa have no independent funding sources other than donor 80 Africa Governance Report II, Economic Commission for Africa, Oxford University Press, 2009 81 Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mali, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia 82 AGR II expanded the focus group of countries by 9 to include: Cape Verde, The Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Madagascar, Rwanda, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Togo and Tunisia 5. NEPAD and the African Civil Society Today A Decade of NEPAD support, and as such, their activities are most often channelled toward donor priorities. Furthermore, AGR II’s panel of experts found that CSOs in Africa still face significant funding constraints alongside other challenges, such as a lack of qualified managers, weak organisational infrastructures and other operational challenges. Africa CSOs also often lack key advocacy skills in areas such as public relations, lobbying, research, and negotiation. AGR II also noted that most African CSOs are inhibited by their external funding obligations from having the latitude to set their own agendas or dictate the pace of their programmes. Many of these institutions also get caught up in the funding and reporting cycles of their international development partners and this has left little opportunity for autonomy or African centred and African owned agenda setting and programme design. The fact that many African NGOs are also personal entities owned by individuals was also raised as a concern by the AGR II experts because such micro-organizations are more susceptible to financial mismanagement and corruption by government officials seeking to collude with civil society to feign transparency or to avoid disclosure. Notwithstanding the infancy and relative fragility and organizational shortcomings of the African CSO sector, AGR II noted that there were a number of key areas where African CSOs have been able to play constructive and important roles in Africa’s governance development, including in the following areas of: ӹ Welfare and service delivery ӹ Human rights monitoring and reporting ӹ Promotion of government accountability and transparency ӹ Provision of advisory service to government on trade and international protocol issues ӹ Environmental protection ӹ Combating corruption ӹ Budget monitoring ӹ Advocating for freedom of information ӹ Policy and legislation development ӹ Campaigning for free and fair electoral processes ӹ Community stakeholder participation in development project implementation What AGR II also found was that the effectiveness of CSOs in Africa was directly commensurate with the space created 65
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