Presentation to the International Symposium on Building the Capacity and Resources of African Non-Governmental Organisations

Addis Ababa
6 December 2004

Distinguished colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, I want to begin by congratulating Africa Humanitarian Action on its tenth anniversary and on all it has achieved in its first ten years.  I also congratulate AHA on working with others to convene this meeting to consider priorities for action in the years ahead.

The Agenda for the Conference gives my session the title “Current Constraints and the Way Ahead”.  I want to begin therefore by summarising recent developments in order to provide the context within which we need to think about the challenge of the next period.

The first major change in recent years is the end of the Cold War.  In 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down and Nelson Mandela was released from prison, we all had great hopes of a new world order – the end of apartheid, less defence spending, more international co-operation and more focus on development and justice for the poor of the world.  In that mood of hope, I am afraid we underestimated the challenge the end of the Cold War would pose.  The division of the Cold War had shaped every tension and conflict in the world for 50 years.  It had shaped dividing lines in the UN system and much of the politics of the developing world as both sides competed for favour with developing countries.

These divisions played a major role in post colonial Africa.  The two sides were involved in the wars in Mozambique, Angola, Ethiopia and Eritrea and in providing arms throughout Africa.  And Western support for dictators like Mobutu demonstrated the distortions in the use of aid and the process of development.  Then the end of the Cold War led to a rapid withdrawal of interest in Africa and a large reduction in aid often leaving behind bloated armies and weak states.  This led on to an era of conflict and civil war in many parts of Africa leading to large numbers of refugees and displaced people.  Africa has by far the greatest number of displaced people in the World. 13 million internally displaced and 3.5 million refugees.   In 1992, we saw a failure of a UN peacekeeping effort, supported by the US, in Somalia and in 1994 the terrible failure to act to prevent the genocide in Rwanda.  Given that it was the Rwandan crisis that led to the birth of AHA, it is important to learn the lessons of the mistakes of the humanitarian response to the Rwandan crisis.  These mistakes strengthened the forces that organised the genocide and was a substantial cause of the war and crisis in the Congo which is still unresolved.

Outside Africa, we saw similar developments in the Balkans with former Communist leaders inciting ethnic division and ethnic cleansing in order to keep themselves in power and an equally inadequate response from the international system.  At the same time, many states of the former Soviet Union descended into corruption, poverty and instability.

This period coincided with a period of rapid economic change known as Globalisation.  This new phase of intensification of the integration of the world economy is the result of the end of the Cold War creating one world economy and the new information technologies which transformed and speeded up global communications.  These changes have led to rapid economic development in East Asia which managed to attract inward investment, use the comparative advantage of its abundant low cost labour to process and export manufactured goods whilst investing heavily in education and thus moving their countries forward.  But there is a real danger that the poorest countries will be left poor and marginalised from the world economy.

Overall the ‘90s proved disappointing.  Instead of a new world order, we saw growing disorder and a growth of poverty and inequality.  But by the end of the ‘90s, there seemed to be a new determination to address these problems.  The Brahimi report made a clear analysis and set of recommendations for reform in the UN system so that it could respond more quickly and more effectively to prevent and resolve conflict.  In the cases of Sierra Leone and East Timor – despite the early UN stumble in Sierra Leone – the system did work better and both countries were brought to peace and support was provided to disarm and resettle fighters and build new state institutions.  And then in 1998 in Kyoto the world reached an agreement to begin to address the problem of carbon dioxide emissions and global warming.  In 2000, the UN General Assembly at a meeting convened to mark the new Millennium and attended by more Presidents and Prime Ministers than any previous UN meeting, the world agreed to make poverty reduction the central aim of its endeavours and every country committed to the aim halving poverty, slashing infant and maternal mortality, getting all children into school and providing clean water by 2015.  In Doha in November 2001, the World Trade Organisation held a Ministerial meeting and it was agreed that negotiations should begin for a new trade round focused on making trade rules fair for poor countries  At Monterrey in Mexico in 2002, at a UN meeting on Finance for Development, the world reached consensus on the most beneficial balance of state and market to achieve its poverty reduction aims.  The rich countries also agreed to reverse the decline in aid spending and even President George W Bush joined this consensus.  At Johannesburg in September 2002, the UN convened a meeting to consider progress on improving our management of environmental resources, ten years after the Rio meeting.  Prior to this there had been great tension between the environmental movements of the north who were seen from the south as living in countries that had polluted and plundered the world to achieve development and now wished to impose rules that would prevent the development of the poorest countries.  At Johannesburg it was agreed that there must be an international commitment to the Millennium Development Goals for the reduction of poverty and agreement to work together to manage the earth’s environmental resources sustainably.  It is notable that even the attack on the Twin Towers on September 11 2002 did not at first seem to destabilise this wave of commitment to solidarity and multilateralism with the Monterrey, Doha and Johannesburg meetings all taking place after September 11th.

But then came the attack on Iraq in March 2003, and the bitter division across the world and in the UN Security Council that this caused.  And because he stood up for the authority of international law and the UN, the US unleashed a campaign of vilification and undermining of both the UN and its Secretary General, Kofi Annan.  And thus we have seen a story pumped and spun across the world that the Oil for Food programme in Iraq was corruptly administered and that Kofi Annan through his son was tainted.  In fact, under the programme, Saddam Hussein placed the contracts and a UN committee dominated by the US and UK decided which to block and which to allow.  It was widely understood that these contracts were not let in the most transparent way and that Turkey and Jordan had managed to acquire Iraqi oil in a way that evaded sanctions.  None of this was the fault of Kofi Annan or the UN, but was understood and colluded in by the US and UK.

This then was the background to the call for an African renaissance – which came with the end of apartheid and South Africa rejoining the continent to which it belonged.  This led on to the development of Nepad – the New Programme for African Development which was a programme for reform and development drawn up by African leaders rather than outsiders telling Africa what to do.  And then the formation of the African Union to replace the OAU with stronger authority and institutional structure reflected a new determination in Africa to take charge of its own fate.

The growth of AHA is part of this new determination in Africa to take charge of its own fate.  Over $1billion every year is spent on coping with humanitarian crises in Africa, yet the organisers of almost all of this assistance comes from outside the continent.  Great stress was placed yesterday in the speeches of K Y Amoako and Patrick Mazimhaka on the need not to separate the provision of humanitarian assistance from development, otherwise many millions of people are trapped in refugee camps, dependent on handouts and unable to get back to taking charge of their own lives.  I believe these problems are linked.  Africans should be taking the lead in the provision of humanitarian assistance because the continent should take charge of its own problems; because it is more efficient to employ local people; and because local people speak the languages and will learn from the disaster, think about the causes and therefore search for the long term solutions that move from humanitarian relief to long term development.

The challenge of the next phase is not just a funding challenge.  There is an urgent need to build local capacity and expertise so that there are organisations throughout the continent that can manage money and people and move quickly and effectively to put suitable arrangements whenever an emergency arises.  This will require lots of training and a sharing of knowledge and expertise to build capacity in every part of the continent.

There is no doubt that we are living through a very difficult and challenging period in the history of the world.  But this is an era of hope for Africa.  A lot of conflicts have ended - Sierra Leone, Angola, Sudan, although the Sudan process is deeply complicated by the genocidal killing in Darfur.  There are also important peace processes in Congo, Burundi and Liberia.  There is no doubt that there are setbacks like Côte D’Ivoire and that many of these peace processes are frail but it is notable that Africa is taking a much stronger lead in resolving conflict.  Thus we see the African Union leading in Darfur, South Africa playing a very important role in brokering peace in the DRC and African leadership and peacekeepers supporting the process in Burundi.  This is a shift with African leadership and African peacekeepers being deployed but what is needed more often is a supportive UN mandate and the automatic funding that is therefore provided so that – particularly in the case of Darfur – sufficient troops can be deployed with a tough enough mandate to halt the killing.

In Africa now, there are examples of countries rebuilding and developing successfully – Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania, Ghana are demonstrating great success.  And the African presence at international trade talks is now organised and effective but Africa is still getting poorer overall.  The continent needs 7 percent economic growth every year between now and 2015 to achieve the target of halving poverty.  We are a very long way from that and to make better progress there needs to be faster progress in ending conflict.  There must also be more rapid progress on regional economic integration to overcome the destructive consequences of the colonial boundaries and create larger markets to encourage the growth of local businesses and attract inward investment.  There must also be more effort to build on the examples of success in building the institutions of modern, capable states which provide basic health care and education for all their people – the absence of which causes suffering and holds back economic development.

HIV/Aids is also an enormous challenge.  It is a cause of terrible suffering and loss of life, but it also carries a terrible economic toll as it shortens the life of the economically active generation leaving children and elders to cope alone.  But there are important examples of a successful response to the crisis, particularly in Uganda and Senegal and these must be built upon across the continent.

I have no doubt that much greater progress is possible.  Africa’s leadership is growing stronger, but there needs to be a much greater effort to build on the successes there have been.  Building a stronger civil society is crucial to this, and this means not just NGOs but local media, academics, and faith based organisations that turn their attention to poverty and development.  There has been a spread of multi-party democracy in Africa, but too often it has spread new forms of corruption.  Civil society must build its strength in order to use the democratic space to improve government delivery.

In my view, the challenge of this Conference is to build on the last 10 years of growth of AHA to increase Africa’s capacity to deal with humanitarian catastrophe and to build capacity at national level throughout the continent and to share knowledge of success and indeed failure because we all have our failures and can learn a lot if we share the lessons with each other.

I have no doubt that local expertise can grow.  More people can learn how to apply for financing and experience can be developed on the ground, but it is very important that the tail does not wag the dog.  The African response must not be shaped by the availability of finance and the fads of western development thinking.  African organisations must build ownership and knowledge of successful humanitarian intervention, peace building and development.

In conclusion, the world is changing massively and particularly in Africa, the end of the Cold War creates new opportunities for the continent to take charge of its own fate.  In my view globalisation creates opportunities and not just threats.  If for example we look at the East Asian model of development and think about how it might apply to Africa, then agricultural processing for the European market, and call centres that are driving progress in India should be located in this continent rich in skills in languages and much nearer to Europe and located in the same time zone.  Africa has many riches which are exported raw from the continent and the jobs and value added are captured elsewhere.  But to move forward Africa must end its conflicts, build capable states, provide education and health care to its people and draw back to the continent its most precious export of all, the large numbers of educated people who are working outside Africa.  This is the challenge for the next era.  Enormous progress is possible, but there is much to do.  AHA has an important role to play as does the rest of civil society.  And everyone must be determined to move forward with great urgency because for millions of hard working Africans life is getting harder and poorer.

Clare Short MP