Foreword While the APRM is preparing to celebrate its 15th anniversary in March 2018, it is with immense pleasure, pride and a sense of responsibility that the APRM Secretariat publishes The Major Bottlenecks Facing Africa today. This is a report with lofty ambitions: it asks difficult questions, attempts to answer those questions and proposes ways forward. The issues that are dealt with are very well-known to all of us; they are bottlenecks to Africa; they are bottlenecks to our individual and communal lives; they hold us back; they choke our daily lives and stifle our prospects; they need addressing. Who would need to be told that such issues as underdeveloped infrastructure or agriculture, poor service delivery capacity or lack of industrialisation, lack of access to opportunities or conflict and the violation of human rights are bottlenecks holding Africa back? We all live with them every day. A lot has been said about each and every one of these bottlenecks by policy makers, scholars, development researchers and campaigners, diplomats, statesmen, community leaders, and just about everyone who has the will to see what life is like for the average African. From this, one would be entitled to ask: why do we need yet another voluminous document on issues that are so part of our daily lives and on which so much has been said and written? I believe this report brings added value by approaching these old and well-known issues from a particular, perhaps even unique, perspective – asking one simple but profound question: what can the APRM do, if any, to help overcome these wellknown and well-entrenched challenges to the continent? That is the main contribution of this report. The point of departure for this report is the thesis that most of these challenges are essentially challenges of governance. On the surface, they might look like they are about building a highway or a school and hospital or about techniques of farming or manufacturing. Yet, we all know that no amount of technology or investment will address these challenges until and unless the entire effort is underpinned by some of the most fundamental principles of good governance. And if governance is so much at the core of all these bottlenecks, it is right that our leaders looked to the APRM for guidance. After all, the APRM is almost certainly the boldest and the most innovative initiative these leaders – indeed, any group of statesmen and stateswomen in any part of the world – have ever undertaken. As such, when we were tasked by our leaders with such a responsibility – to reexamine these old and established continental challenges with a view to identifying governance-related entry points towards resolving them – we gave it all the attention it requires and came up with this report. In developing this report, we looked into the APRM tools and processes, conducted a comprehensive examination of all 17 Country Review Reports and their progress reports, consulted our stakeholders through semi-structured questionnaires, presented different stages of the draft report to various statutory and expert group meetings, and reflected the feedback from all of these to produce this report. And the final product is highly gratifying. Not only does it examine each of the bottlenecks from an APRM perspective; it also proposes what can be done on each bottleneck within the APRM framework in the form of (1) potential targeted, bottleneck-specific, reviews in countries that may volunteer to do so freely, and (2) informing the ongoing renewal of the APRM tools and processes, including the Country Self-Assessment Questionnaire, with the resulting recommendations. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my colleagues for their hard work and dedication in the preparation of this report, and the UNECA for supporting us with the expert validation of the draft report. I also wish to pay tribute to the leadership of H.E. Yoweri Museveni, President of the Republic of Uganda, who initiated the idea and championed the development of this project to its present state. Prof. Eddy Maloka CEO, APRM Secretariat November 2017, Midrand, South Africa 6