CAADP BACKGROUND
There is strong pressure to move the CAADP process beyond the political commitment and framework stage to start implementation on the ground. The Secretariat has been working on an implementation roadmap over the last few months and is now ready to take the process to Regional Economic Communities (RECs) and their member countries. The note provides a brief overview of the roadmap and describes in more details the organization of the Regional Implementation Planning (RIP) Meetings, which constitute a critical element of the implementation process. The roadmap, as well as the process underlying it, reflects the respective roles of: (a) the NEPAD Secretariat as a facilitator and a mobilizer of resources and expertise and (b) the RECs and member countries as primary implementers. Both emphasize the Secretariat’s role in linking African countries to the investment resources and technical expertise that are required to implement the CAADP agenda. The main value addition of the Secretariat’s activities are the following: (i) use of NEPAD’s political capital to facilitate access by African countries to a substantially larger pool of investment finance and technical expertise than they could mobilize individually and separately; and (ii) facilitation of benchmarking and mutual learning and exchange across countries in order to accelerate the spread and adoption of successful development models and best practices.
The implementation roadmap defines an action-oriented process which, by May 2005, would produce investment options and institutional arrangements that would allow: (i) RECs and member countries to prepare investment projects and (ii) development partners to plan for long term financial assistance. The main four steps of the roadmap are the following: (a) specification of major actionable programs and initiatives based on the CAADP Pillars; (b) definition of a strategy to mobilize a limited number of lead financial partners for each of the programmes and initiatives; (c) identification of major centers of expertise, international as well as regional and national, as lead technical partners; and (d) organization of 4 regional implementation planning meetings to agree on rules and procedures for country and regional-level project preparation, in-country resource mobilization, access to funding by development partners, coordination and governance, and program/project performance review. The present note deals with the last step. More information on the other three steps can be found in the Secretariat’s report on CAADP implementation and food security (attached), which was prepared for the 3rd African Partnership Forum in Washington DC in October 2004.
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