African ministers of finance will be meeting in Tunis on November 22 and 23 to seek common positions on a range of issues affecting regional economic development and chart a course of action for the coming years.
The gathering comes at an important juncture, ahead of the critical December meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Hong Kong focusing on agricultural trade issues, and following renewed pledges of aid to Africa’s poorest countries from donor nations.
To be hosted by the African Development Bank (AfDB), the meeting will also be attended by representatives of the African Union, the secretariat of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad), the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and other important regional economic organisations.
“As the year 2005 comes to an end — a year in which several initiatives on Africa have been launched — it is important that we not only take stock of commitments made by the region and its development partners, but also attempt to chart a course going forward,” AfDB president and host of the meeting Donald Kaberuka said in a statement on Friday.
The two-day ministerial conference will focus on the region’s most-critical development needs and review the way forward on initiatives emanating from last July’s Group of Eight summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, and later endorsed by other donors.
The ministers will discuss debt-cancellation initiatives within the broad context of mobilising resources to finance the UN Millennium Development Goals in Africa. They are expected to examine a framework for a pan-African needs analysis and discuss measures to ensure that any scaling up of aid will result in effective outcomes on the ground.
They will also pay special attention to the infrastructure needs of the region, especially those identified within the Nepad framework.
The conference will provide an opportunity for ministers to exchange views on trade issues in national programmes, competitiveness and trading capacity against the background of the Doha Round and the forthcoming WTO conference in Hong Kong.
The ministers will also examine the effect of oil-price fluctuations on the economies of the region.
Speaking in Washington, DC, recently, the AFDB’s Kaberuka urged the international development community to accelerate work on facilities to help deal with the shock effects of oil-price increases while countries adjust to the longer-term structural shift in the market. — I-Net Bridge