SANF 08 No 13
The 14 member states of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) will meet in Mauritius in April for high-level consultations on poverty eradication and regional development.
The SADC International Consultative Conference on Poverty and Development to be held from18-20 April is a high-level dialogue between SADC and its stakeholders at ministerial level and involving senior business and civil society leaders from the region to engage in policy dialogue, forge consensus, and review progress of the SADC economic integration agenda, with emphasis on poverty eradication.
Under the theme “Regional Economic Integration: A Strategy for Poverty Eradication towards Sustainable Development”, the conference will discuss strategies, commitments and resources needed to deepen SADC’s regional economic integration goals and accelerate the implementation of the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
SADC Heads of State and Government will be in attendance for the third day of the conference and participate in a number of panel discussions, together with selected Heads of State and Government from other regions of Africa, Asia, South America and Europe.
International Cooperating Partners (ICPs) will also participate, many at a senior government level.
This conference is expected to be a milestone towards poverty eradication in the region, and to lay the foundations for a new global partnership for SADC for this purpose. The conference will also assess the challenges toward achievement of the MDGs in the SADC region.
The scope of the conference is in the context of the SADC agenda as articulated in the 1992 SADC Treaty which says that regional integration will be pursued as the vehicle for accelerating economic growth, eradicating poverty and achieving a sustainable pattern of development.
The World Summit for Social Development in 1995 defined absolute poverty as “a condition characterized by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information.”
The conference in Mauritius is expected to propose and adopt a Regional Poverty Reduction Framework (RPRF) with SMART targets and clear monitoring and evaluation plans.
SMART targets are: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-bound.
The consultations toward this framework will focus on innovative programmes and time-specific tasks and actions to strengthen national poverty reduction programmes and accelerate progress toward MDGs targets such as halving the number of people who were living in absolute poverty in 1990, by 2015, as well as other education, health, gender, environment and infrastructure goals.
The conference is also expected to launch the SADC Poverty Observatory, which is intended to keep the poverty eradication agenda in the forefront of SADC’s programme of action.
SADC also expects to receive concrete pledges of technical and financial support from the international community, development partners and the private sector in line with international development commitments.
One objective of the April conference is to re-mobilize the international community, in particular the developed countries, to meet their commitments with regard to increasing the levels of development aid.
The process leading to the conference has been wide-ranging with a number of research projects for key poverty reduction challenges and strategies, stakeholders consultations at national level, a regional technical workshop and various policy meetings.
Sub-themes of conference are: Trade including informal cross-border trade; infrastructure support; education, skills and technologies; strengthening the role of agriculture, gender and development; and the economic cost of HIV and AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis in the SADC region.
SADC is currently implementing a long-term plan for the region called the Regional Indicative Strategic Development Plan (RISDP), which identifies poverty as “one of the major development challenge facing the SADC region” and assigns top priority to poverty eradication, achieving sustainable economic growth and deepening economic integration.
The RISDP identifies regional economic integration as a key strategy for this objective and sets targets for deepening economic integration. These include the establishment of a SADC Free Trade Area in 2008, and a Customs Union by 2010, Common Market by 2015, Monetary Union by 2016 with a regional currency by 2018.
The SADC Consultative Conference is a bi-annual platform for SADC and its International Cooperating Partners (ICPs) to discuss the implementation of the SADC agenda and resource needs.
