Joint Africa Institute: Inaugural seminar focuses on economic reform, governance, and capacity building
| Pages | 399-400 |
Page 399
In his opening remarks, Omar Kabbaj, President of the AfDB, welcomed the increased collaboration on training in Africa between the three founding institutions. IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus, in his address delivered via videotape, highlighted the IMF's increased emphasis on poverty alleviation and high-quality growth, and referred to the JAI as "a new milestone in the enhancement of economic and financial training opportunities in Africa." Vinod Thomas, Director of the World Bank Institute, who spoke on behalf of World Bank President James Wolfensohn, stressed the complementarities that the three institutions would bring to capacity building in Africa through the JAI. The inaugural ceremony was presided over by Côte d'Ivoire's Prime Minister Daniel Kablan Duncan, who underscored his country's commitment to capacity building and his support for the JAI.
The first session, chaired by Côte d'Ivoire's Minister of Planning Tidjane Thiam, reviewed the changing role of the African state. The speakers (Henock Kiflé of the AfDB, George Abed of the IMF's Fiscal Affairs Department, and Vinod Thomas), emphasized that the state's new role must include ensuring peace and macro-economic stability, providing and enforcing politicalPage 400 democracy and a level playing field for the private sector, and enhancing equity to ensure the social sustainability of reforms. Abed emphasized that good governance was critical in this regard. Furthermore, governments needed to get the policy fundamentals right and to develop their human and institutional capacity in order to provide the necessary conditions for sustainable, high-quality growth, the best assurance for reducing poverty.
The session dealing with the challenge of macroeconomic stabilization in Africa was chaired by G.E. Gondwe, Director of the IMF's African Department. Kwesi Botchwey, Director of the Harvard Institute for Development, underscored that macroeconomic imbalances had already been significantly reduced and that the issue now at stake for Africa was that of reducing corruption and alleviating poverty. He expressed concern about what he perceived to be the loss of control by the African countries over their policy agenda to donors and multilateral institutions. Mamoudou Touré, former Director of the IMF's African Department, said, however, that he felt considerable efforts...
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