The challenge of Africa: ministers debate vicious cycle of poverty and conflict, new initiatives for development.

• Position: UN Economic and Social Council

Faced with unrelenting impoverishment, marginalization and social strife engulfing Africa - home to the greatest proportion of least developed nations in the world - ministers from every region of the world convened during the 1995 session of the UN Economic and Social Council to tackle the complex range of interrelated issues and problems that have made the economic and social development of Africa a formidable challenge.

"Today, this continent often baffles the world by continually giving the international community reasons for alternating between hope and discouragement", UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali said on 4 July in an address to the opening of the Council's three-day high-level segment, whose purpose is to set UN policy on major international matters.

Not only must Africa contend with an unwieldy debt burden, runaway population growth and environmental deterioration, but also "the African continent is still too often the scene of ethnic confrontations and civil wars that compound the existing poverty and underdevelopment", the Secretary-General continued, noting that there are currently 10 wars and internal conflicts underway and nearly 9 million refugees and displaced persons in Africa - the highest figure of any other continent. "Conflicts help to spawn poverty, and poverty is itself an undeniable factor in conflict. This vicious cycle absolutely has to be broken", he said.

During the 1980s, several regional and international initiatives - including the UN Programme of Action for African Economic Development - were launched, but most of them were only partly implemented. In 1991, the General Assembly adopted the UN New Agenda for the Development of Africa in the 1990s, with the hope that the end to the cold war would provide new and ample opportunities for international cooperation to halt Africa's downward spiral.

Mixed results

However, four years after the adoption of the New Agenda and one year before its mid-term review, the results are mixed, according to a report of the Secretary-General (E/1995/81) for consideration at the high-level segment, which notes that the social and economic situation in Africa on the whole continues to be unsatisfactory. The continent remains plagued by inadequate infrastructure, weak institutions, poorly utilized human resources, a great vulnerability to natural and climatic disasters, and the impact of unfavourable terms of trade.

According to the Secretary-General, while some...