Jointly organised by Third World Network (TWN) Africa, and the Council for
the Development of Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA) in Accra, Ghana, April
23 - 26 2002
In 1980,
African leaders came together in Nigeria to adopt the Lagos Plan of Action which
was seen as the continent’s blueprint not only for checking the crises which
were building up in African economies but also for overcoming the persistent
problems of underdevelopment facing the continent. The ink had, however, hardly
dried on the Lagos Plan before the World Bank issued the infamous Berg Report
that set the stage for the imposition of orthodox, neo-liberal structural
adjustment programmes on African countries. For the next two decades, African
countries, under the pain of donor conditionality, were compelled to implement
measures which essentially complicated the economic problems confronting them.
With the ‘Washington Consensus’ on which orthodox adjustment measures were
built having exhausted its possibilities, the search is on once again for
alternative development paradigms for transforming Africa. From Thabo Mbeki’s
renaissance speech in Cape Town to the millennium action plan (MAP) which he,
Bouteflika and Obasanjo helped to formulate and Abdoulaye Wade’s Omega Plan
which was later merged with MAP and renamed first the New Africa Initiative
(NAI) and now the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD), there has
been a concerted political and policy effort to ensure that the 21st
century and the new
millennium do not elude the continent. Ironically, these initiatives that have
culminated in the adoption of NEPAD are being pursued at the same time as the
World Bank has issued its own publication on how Africa might claim the 21st Century. A new race appears to be on for the
definition of the parameters and content of an African developmental agenda for
the new millennium. Which way will the continent go, under whose direction and
by what mechanisms?
The
Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) and
the Third World Network(TWN) Africa are inviting proposals for the contribution
of papers from African scholars and civil society activists to an international
conference aimed at facilitating a critical review of the on-going quest for an
alternative developmental framework for Africa beyond structural adjustment. The
conference will also aim to ensure a wider dissemination of the contents of
these two potentially influential documents among African intellectuals, policy
practitioners and activists; provide a forum for debate on the merits of the
publications in the expectation that other perspectives on Africa’s
development policy alternatives will emerge; and establish a network of African
scholars interested in research for advocacy, with perspectives on development
policy which may be different from those of the World Bank sponsored networks.
Among the
issues which the conference is expected to address are: the experience of twenty
years of (mal)adjustment in Africa; the prospects for an autonomous African
developmental strategy in the context of the on-going processes of
globalisation; the similarities and differences between the two different
initiatives that have now been consolidated into NEPAD; the NEPAD viewed against
the Lagos Plan of Action; the NEPAD viewed against IMF/World Bank structural
adjustment and against the World Bank’s publication entitled Can Africa
Claim the 21st Century?; the place of NEPAD
within the African Pan Africanist project, including the rebirth of sub-regional
and continental cooperation/integration; the developmental content of the NEPAD
and the strategic questions which are linked to its implementation.
Themes
for the Conference
-
From
Lagos Plan to NEPAD
-
Development
and Poverty Reduction
-
Africa
and the World trade system
-
Citizenship,
Democracy and Development
-
The
Role of the State in Development
-
Financing
Development
-
Agriculture
and Industry
-
Education
and Health.
-
Lessons
of experience from other developing regions
-
Alternative
views on a broad development agenda
