What’s new in the ‘New Partnership forAfrica’s Development’?International Affairs 78,  () ‒ALEX DE WAAL*ºDoes the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) present Africa’sbest hope for achieving sustained growth alongside good governance? Or is itanother grand plan that will be unravelled by the weakness of African govern-ments and their tolerance for abuse of power—most recently and graphicallydemonstrated by African heads of states’ readiness to approve the elections inZimbabwe? Visitors to NEPAD’s website will find its content disappointinglythin and will remain puzzled by the initiative.1 Its leaders—the most prominentheads of state on the African continent—have direct access to the G8 summit,and leading G8 governments are themselves preparing an ‘Action Plan’ forAfrica based on NEPAD. But few in either group have taken the trouble toexplain to their citizens the basic principles of NEPAD, an omission that has ledto much wild speculation about its purpose and content. Seen by some as ameans of circumventing the unwieldy processes of Organization of AfricanUnity (OAU) and its envisaged successor the African Union, NEPAD hasrecently been described both as a ‘programme in support of the African Union’2and as a ‘mandated initiative of the African Union’.3This article provides a brief overview of NEPAD, focusing on the processwhereby it has emerged and is developing, with particular attention to its govern-ance components. The argument is that NEPAD does indeed hold out thepromise of transforming Africa’s development prospects, though more modestlythan its headline claims might suggest. There are major constraints on NEPAD’sprospects of success, but the process of constructing the initiative holds out thehope that these may be minimized. NEPAD is properly oriented but has becometoo ambitious. It needs to scale back and focus on the essential core activities*This article has benefited from helpful comments provided by Malcolm McPherson and Abdul Mohammed.1www.nepad.org.2African Development Forum III, ‘Defining priorities for regional integration: consensus statement andthe way ahead’, Addis Ababa, Economic Commission for Africa, 8 March 2002 (www.uneca.org/adfiii/consensus.htm), para. 80.3Communiqué issued at the end of the second meeting of the Heads of State and GovernmentImplementation Committee of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (HSIC), Abuja, 26 March2002 (www.gov.za/issues/nepad/com2meet.htm), para. 20.Untitled-2 6/19/02, 3:23 PM463Alex de Waal464necessary to sustain development and governance in the face of the HIV/AIDSpandemic, matching its aspirations to the financial and human resources andinstitutional capacities of Africa today. NEPAD is still work in progress, and thearticle concludes with some suggestions for how it may shape its agenda, parti-cularly in the field of governance.What is NEPAD?NEPAD is both a ‘big idea’ and an umbrella for best practices. It is an openingfor major resource flows, both aid- and trade-related, and an attempt to re-envision development partnership on the basis of good governance within Africa.The ‘big idea’ element is important for keeping NEPAD on the agenda of theG8 and OECD, where ideas and plans have to be presented with boldness andsimplicity if they are to seize the attention of world leaders. NEPAD thus ties into the promise of bold international action to resolve Africa’s crisis, as laid outmost notably by the British government. Meanwhile it is the upgrading of exist-ing best practices that holds out the promise that NEPAD may actually work.NEPAD’s stated aim is to achieve the overall 7 per cent annual growth neces-sary for Africa to meet one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs4):halving poverty by 2015. Few honestly expect that this target can be met, as itinvolves more than doubling Africa’s recent growth rates; only a few best-performing African countries have met this target, and then only intermittently.Economic growth during 1991–2000 averaged just 2.1 per cent a year, less thanpopulation growth of 2.8 per cent. Africa has an annual financing gap ofapproximately $10 billion: meeting this requires an unprecedented increase indomestic saving (from today’s rate of approximately 19 per cent to about 33 percent for the whole of Africa, and an even steeper task for sub-Saharan Africa)augmented by debt relief, foreign direct investment and overseas developmentassistance. Factoring in the costs of conflict, endemic disease and the low levelsof capitalization, not to mention the economic impact of the HIV/AIDSpandemic,5 it seems probable that Africa is at least a generation away fromachieving these development goals.6 If present trends continue, by 2015 about37 per cent of Africans—three times the average of all developing countries—will be struggling to live on $1 a day and the continent will have the dubious4MDGs were established by the UN General Assembly at its Millennium session as targets for thepromotion of human development.5Paul Collier, ‘On the economic consequences of civil war’, Oxford Economic Papers 51, 1999, pp. 168–83;John Luke Gallup and Jeffrey D. Sachs, ‘The economic burden of malaria’, Supplement to the AmericanJournal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 64: 1, 2001, pp. 85–96; Bureau of Economic Research, The macro-economic impact of HIV/AIDS in South Africa, Economic Research Note no. 10, Sept. 2001; MalcolmMcPherson, Deborah Hoover and Donald Snodgrass, The impact on economic growth in Africa of rising costsand labor productivity losses associated with HIV/AIDS, JFK School of Government, Harvard University,Aug. 2000.6Ali Abdel Gadir Ali, ‘Africa’s children and Africa’s development: a duration of development framework’,in Alex de Waal and Nicolas Argenti, eds, Young Africa: realising the rights of children and youth (Trenton,NJ: Africa World Press, 2002).Untitled-2 6/19/02, 3:23 PM464What’s new in the ‘New Partnership for Africa’s Development’?465distinction of having more than half of the world’s out-of-school children.7 Notonly does Africa have the lowest life expectancy, but longevity is actually falling,largely on account of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The picture can be painted in away that makes it overwhelmingly depressing.However, a leap of imagination suggests that some very significant goals maybe achievable. Take health. The December 2001 report of the