A summary of initial findings from an ongoing review of progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which will include a set of league tables. The key message is that progress is possible, with a number of countries making real achievements.
Case studies (Tanzania and Guinea) on financing and management of large infrastructure projects in Africa for the Collaborative Africa Budget Reform Initiative (CABRI) dialogue on ensuring value for money in infrastructure projects (EC).
This study examines humanitarian practice in Guinea, as a country at the heart of a region that has experienced a complex succession of conflict-related displacement, focussing on all major refugee camps in Guinee Forestiere, and some surrounding villages.
Under Structural Adjustment, developing countries had been required to subject their economies to competition from international trade in exchange for loans to their governments. After the Washington Consensus was deemed to have failed, Poverty Reduction Strategies were introduced as a way of managing debt relief, addressing social objectives, and giving countries stronger 'ownership' over their recovery policies. But in what ways, regarding trade, do PRSPs and the succeeding loans improve on the preceding arrangements? This book reviews the trade and poverty content of PRSPs and the policy conditions of the lending arrangements which followed for seventeen countries. It concludes that whereas loans almost invariably still establish conditions for trade liberalisation, PRSPs, with few exceptions, neglect trade policy (tending to focus on expenditure rather than production and economic growth). There is thus asymmetry between these innovatory poverty-focused policies and IFI loan financing. The report recommends to redress this imbalance by improving the trade content of the poverty analysis in PRSPs, and for donors and lenders to address supply-side policies relating to trade infrastructure.
In Mali, Senegal, Burkina Faso and Guinea, partnerships between research and producers’ organisations are emerging. These partnerships take various forms, depending on the context in which they evolve; in some cases the extension services are also involved. Researchers from the four countries met in April 1997 to share their experience and draw lessons from approximately two years of activities to promote such partnerships. This paper presents the findings from the workshop, drawing also on the authors’ personal involvement in the four countries.
One of the main rationales for conserving surviving rainforests in West Africa is that they are pristine, having had little or no human disturbance before recent decades. In one of their early papers on this theme, the authors took the Ziama forest biosphere reserve in Guinea as a case study to show that such forests may have a long history of shifting intensive use and that human management might actually have encouraged the spread of forest into savanna areas. Modern conservation policy for Ziama characterised population growth as the key cause of encroachment, disregarding the effect of local people's historical land claims, which are still strongly felt. The authors recommended that conservation agents acknowledge that social and ecological history, and the current priorities of local stakeholders, determine the prevailing structure of the landscape.
Une des raisons principales pour laquelle les forêts ombrophiles qui existent encore en Afrique de l'Ouest doivent être préservées est qu'elles sont virginales, n'ayant pas, ou peu, été perturbées par l'homme avant les récentes décennies. Dans un de leurs documents précédents sur ce thème, les auteurs avait fondé sur une étude de cas dans la réserve forestière de biosphère de Ziama en Guinée, leur argument selon lequel ces forêts ont sans doute une longue histoire d'utilisation itinérante intensive et que leur gestion par l'homme avait peut-être favorisé la propagation de la forêt dans les zones de savane. La politique moderne de conservation pour Ziama identifiait la croissance démographique comme étant la cause principale d'empiétement, sans tenir compte de l'effet des revendications historiques des terres que les autochtones ressentent encore fortement de nos jours. Les auteurs recommandaient que les agents oeuvrant pour la conservation reconnaissent que l'histoire sociale et l'écologique, ainsi que les priorités actuelles des autochtones, déterminent la structure dominante du paysage.
Uno de los principales motivos para la conservación de los bosques pluviales sobrevivientes de África Occidental es su estado prístino, pues supuestamente no habían estado sujetos a intervenciones humanas - o éstas habían sido mínimas - hasta hace pocas décadas. En uno de sus primeros artículos sobre este tema, los autores utilizaron la reserva forestal para la biosfera de Ziama, Guinea, como estudio de caso, con el objeto de mostrar que tales bosques pueden tener una larga historia de uso nómada intensivo y que la gestión humana puede haber impulsado la propagación de los bosques a las superficies de sabanas. La política moderna de conservación para Ziama caracterizaba al crecimiento de la población como el factor más importante para la invasión de estas tierras, sin tomar en consideración el efecto de las reivindicaciones históricas de la población local sobre las tierras, que aún gozan de gran fuerza. Los autores recomendaron que los agentes de la conservación deberían reconocer que la historia social y ecológica, y las prioridades actuales de los interesados locales, determinan la estructura preponderante del paisaje.