IMF is committed partner in Africa's development

• Pages: 225-227

Page 225

On July 10 in Maputo,Mozambique, IMF Managing Director Horst Köhler addressed the first anniversary meeting of the African Union heads of state. Edited excerpts from his remarks follow; the full text is available on the IMF's website (www.imf.org).

Despite a global economic slowdown, growth in Africa has been relatively resilient. Indeed, since the mid-1990s, economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa has averaged well above 3 percent a year, compared with some 1 percent in the first half of the 1990s.

But the gains remain fragile. The sober reality is that maintaining even this relatively good performance will not suffice to halve poverty by 2015, as envisaged in the United Nations Millennium Declaration.

Indeed, the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) itself aims at raising growth to 7 percent a year. This is an ambitious goal. But Africa has the potential to achieve it if an effort is made on all sides to create the domestic conditions for growth through sound national policies and to ensure that the international environment is supportive of Africa's integration with the global economy.

I congratulate you on NEPAD.With it,Africa assumes responsibility for its own transformation, renewal, and development. NEPAD is also promising because it reflects the broad international consensus reached in Monterrey and Johannesburg last year. Partnership and peer review are integral parts of NEPAD, and I believe that they will foster a critical element of the development process: the ability to learn from each other.

There is progress in Africa and even success stories, like Botswana.What is needed now is decisive implementation of proven good practice in national policy agendas and in regional and international cooperation.And, most important, the people of Africa, not just its leaders, must understand, accept, and be involved in NEPAD's implementation. That is why I believe the theme of this meeting-Toward Ensuring the Implementation of NEPAD-is exactly the right one.

Growth and challenges

There is ample evidence that countries with prudent macroeconomic policies attain higher growth rates.

We can observe this in Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, The Gambia,Mali,Mauritius, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, and others. In most of these cases, the strong performance has been within the context of IMF-supported programs. Good economic performance has also sustained substantial progress on debt relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative. In the 23 African countries that have reached their decision points, debt service has been halved from about 30 percent of government revenue in 1998 to 15 percent in 2002, while social spending now amounts to four times as much...