Africa lacks comprehensive monitoring system - Archbishop Ndungane

So says the president of African Monitor, Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane, who has noted with disappointment the lack of a comprehensive monitoring framework for decisions made by African finance ministers.

For while the ministers explored the continent's untapped potential, vast natural resources and its possible ability to increase aggregate demand, revive growth and address global imbalances, the biggest missing element in Africa's commitment to its own development through the years has been its inability to implement good decisions that have been made. To a large extent, this can be attributed to a lack of accountability systems as the African Union and the Economic Commission for Africa have not developed comprehensive monitoring frameworks.

Framework will be an indicator

"Quite a few loose frameworks have been developed to monitor continental development in the past, but none has been comprehensive and serious enough to bring results," said Archbishop Ndungane. "A good framework is essential as it will provide stakeholders, which includes governments, civil societies, private sector and communities as well management with an early indication of progress, or lack thereof, in the achievement of results. Citizen-led monitoring processes in particular, provide an incentive for African governments to make available the relevant financing for commitments, and to implement programmes on the ground."

African Monitor, an organisation that monitors development funding commitments, funding delivery as well as the impact on grassroots communities, attended the meeting to lobby on behalf of the grassroots communities and to monitor the meeting's progress. Led by its director, Namhla Mniki-Mangaliso, a delegation from the organisation put forward a number of proposals to accelerate progress at the grassroots level, which includes a broad-based and widely-owned framework to monitor any strategies and development initiatives that may have been decided on at the meeting.

Said Mniki-Mangaliso: "We are frustrated by the fact that although African government ministers make very good decisions at most of their meetings, there is very little adoption of those decisions at the national level where they should be implemented. Ugandan, Malawian, and Kenyan delegations have strongly expressed dismay that these meetings become talk shops. There is still not sufficient buy-in about a citizen-led monitoring agenda."

Only the elite benefits

Mniki-Mangaliso said that finance ministers were to approve the establishment of five new financing mechanisms and structures - including that of African Risk Capacity, African Mineral Development Centre, and African Institute for Remittances. "We want to know how these will be financed when African governments are struggling with domestic resource mobilisation, and is setting up new institutions every year the best way to make sure that resources reach the African people. We are not convinced. In fact, it seems that while these may be good ideas in principle, structuring them as institutional bureaucracies is another way of making sure that resources provide employment and benefits for the elite, while the African people remain destitute," she said.

Archbishop Ndungane said that monitoring serves two very important purposes: strengthening accountability and transparency which in the end will provide empirical evidence on the outcomes, and improving management which should ensure a more efficient and effective process and programme. "It will also assist in providing credible reports and the ability to demonstrate to all stakeholders whether what is agreed on at this meeting is implemented in a participatory way and will improve the lives of the poor people on the continent.

"The monitoring of the continental framework should therefore include a multi-disciplinary approach including all stakeholders and should not be left to the implementers. This situation, if allowed to continue, means that there will never be a connection between what African governments are doing at the macro-level, and what citizens want on the ground," said Archbishop Ndungane.