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Lloyd Gumbo in Victoria Falls
African governments must prioritise developmental frameworks proffered by experts in the continent, instead of being obsessed with policies from outside Africa, experts have said. Delegates attending the Third Africa Think Tank Summit in Victoria Falls yesterday said African experts had a better understanding of African problems and subsequent solutions to the same than international organisations.
The summit running under the theme: “Creating a sustainable future for African Think Tanks in Support of Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2063 Implementation”, is organised by the African Capacity Building Foundation in partnership with the African Union Commission, New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA).
ACBF executive secretary, Professor Emmanuel Nnadozie, said it was important for African Governments and organisations to have self-belief in order for the continent to develop.
“African countries and African people for long, have this kind of lack of self-confidence and self-belief that they can bring solutions to Africa’s problems,” he said.
“They keep thinking that the solution lies elsewhere even for small things that are already being done on the ground. Their mindset is that they think they should bring some international multilateral organisations. The mindset is extremely important.”
He said it was important for countries in the continent to come up with collective developmental frameworks so that Africa can develop.
New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) chief executive officer, Dr Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, said it was disheartening that the majority of African governments used Western think tanks instead of African think tanks that are better-positioned to appreciate African problems.
“It is a situation which is wrong for two reasons. Think tanks are about knowledge and knowledge sharing. So, African governments should be in a position to use more African think tanks because we have knowledge in our specific African context in plural sense.
“This makes it easier for these think tanks to target issues that can be of usefulness in policy-making processes and implementation,” said Dr Mayaki. UNECA Deputy Executive Secretary, Dr Abdalla Hamdok added: “Our think tanks can understand our context better than any professor coming from Oxford or Harvard or anywhere in the world.
“We are grounded here, we know our context, we can analyse it better than anybody.”
Dr Hamdok said while Africa was the only continent to come up with common developmental goals under the banner of Agenda 2063, African think tanks have a role to play in ensuring that the goals are achieved.
“Africa would need to come up with probably one framework. We don’t want to confuse our policymakers with multiple development frameworks.
“We need to get involved in the whole cycle from design to implementation and more importantly on the monitoring and evaluation, which brings so many important issues like the need for not only capacity of think tanks, but also data quality and quantity.
“As you know, the motto goes that if you cannot measure it, you cannot improve on it. “This is where our think tanks can play a major role in helping the process and taking decision making from guess work to solidly grounded information and statistics,” said Dr Hamdok.
He said it was important to put into practice the slogan, “African solutions to African problems”.
Online Reporter