In brief

Johannesburg summit 2002

The international community is gearing up for the next in a series of key global conferences to be held this year to focus attention on the need for faster progress toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals-an ambitious agenda for improving living conditions for the world's poor by 2015, set forth at the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000. The World Summit on Sustainable Development, to be held from August 26 to September 4 in Johannesburg, South Africa, and organized by the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, will bring together world leaders, numerous citizen activists, and business representatives to work on a full development agenda for conserving natural resources and improving people's lives globally.

Ten years after the 1992 Earth summit in Rio, the Johannesburg summit aims to decide on concrete policies and set quantifiable targets for better implementing Agenda 21-which the international community adopted at the 1992 Rio summit as a global plan of action for sustainable development. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan recently identified clean drinking water, energy, health, agriculture, and biodiversity as five priority areas for achieving concrete results at the Johannesburg summit.

The Johannesburg summit follows another critical global conference this year. The Financing for Development Conference held in March in Monterrey, Mexico, provided a forum for forging a global partnership to mobilize resources for development.

Technical assistance for Africa

The biggest obstacle encountered by African economies striving for sustainable growth often is not lack of political will but lack of capacity. As part of its commitment to help African countries promote growth and reduce poverty under the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), the IMF will set up African Regional Technical Assistance Centers (AFRITACs) in Abidjan and Dar es Salaam. The new AFRITACs, which will begin operating later this year under agreements signed in April by IMF Managing Director Horst Köhler with Presidents Laurent Gbagbo of Côte d'Ivoire and Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania, are intended to help West and East African countries build local capacity for economic and financial management.

At the AFRITACs, a locally based team of IMF resident experts and short-term specialists will provide technical assistance, and...