The Africa Governance Report Period Global Development Characteristics Africa’s Development Characteristics 1981 - 1990: The Third United Nations Development Decade Address the unfinished business of the Second Development Decade. Targets to be reached by 1990 included growth rates for developing countries of 7.5 per cent of GDP among other economic targets; concessional financing to reach and surpass 0.7 per cent of GDP of developing countries; the reduction and elimination of poverty; a significant reduction of mortality rates; international structural change, including the early establishment of the new international economic order; and changes in international institutions and mechanisms. Ten years after the call for a new international economic order, no progress made towards its establishment. Most targets set for the Third Decade had not been met. Privatisation, liberalisation and fiscal austerity: High levels of debt The IMF, through its Article 4 consultations, provided a cue for other ‘donors’ to provide resources to African countries – usually recommending extreme austerity measures that left a trail of social devastation across the continent. At the beginning of the 1980s, the West forced Africa to follow World Bank /IMF structural adjustment programmes by tying all their grants and loans to strict adherence to IMF and World Bank conditionalities. Mass poverty, starvation, diseases and ignorance were widespread in Africa which during the course of the decade became a platform for experimentation of the Washington Consensus with official development assistance (ODA) as the main tool - the IFIs initiated a policy-based lending and tied development assistance to structural adjustment policies with the focus on macroeconomic policies. With the shift of emphasis from social development to macroeconomic stability, Governments were forced to focus on fiscal and monetary policy at the expense of sectors such as local government, rural development, education, health and employment and infrastructural development. 1991 – 2000: The Fourth United Nations Development decade Address the shortcomings in implementing provisions of the Third Development Decade and redirect development towards previously abandoned social sectors. The 1990s would witness the accelerated development of developing countries – ushering in the decade of “Development with a Human face” Progress mixed, with many challenges remaining. Economic growth no longer a sufficient factor of development. The focus had shifted to institutional preconditions for development, including good governance, transparency and accountability, decentralization and participation, and social security. Poverty Reduction Strategies and HIPC Initiative. Conflict had beset Africa – one in every five Africans lived in a conflict zone and the HIV pandemic had established itself as a massive killer and drain on the human resource capacity base, worsening an already dire situation. Most countries had accumulated foreign debt of well over 150% of their GDP over the two past decades of structural adjustment – many were forced to spend over a third of their export earnings on foreign debt servicing. Intense pressure from the United Nations and international civil society organisations to forgive Africa of its huge debt. the World Bank and the IMF came up with the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative. This initiative required African countries to prepare Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) as a condition for debt relief and access to the IMF Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility and the World Bank concessional loans and grants. The period from 1971 up until the end of the 1990s is often referred to as the ‘lost decades. Page 92 of 96