Professor Emmanuel Nnadozie, executive secretary of the African Capacity Building Foundation, ACBF, on the margins of the ongoing board of governors meeting of the Foundation in Accra, Ghana, from September 4 to 5, speaks with Maureen Chigbo, editor, Realnews, on how African countries can enhance access to and absorb development resources to achieve African Union’s Agenda 2063 and sustainable development goals among other issues. Excerpts

Realnews: How do you see ACBF Board of governors, BOG, proceedings at the meeting today?

Nnadozie: Today’s proceedings went very well. I am very happy because I believe that we exceeded all the expectations we have in terms of the participation and contributions that were made during the deliberations for this meeting.

Realnews: What are these expectations?

Nnadozie: The expectations were that we will come out with concrete solutions to the issues that are on the table. Of course, the most important issue was how to enhance access to and absorption of development resources in Africa and we were to address the problem where in many cases development resources will be available, financing will be available but accessing them often is difficult. But far more important is the inability of many countries to absorb and utilise these resources to achieve their development objectives. So, we came up with concrete solutions on what should be done and what ACBF can do to assist countries in this regard.

Realnews: What are the solutions?

Nnadozie: The solution are that, first of all, we have identified what the constraints were that were preventing countries from assessing and absorbing resources.  First one is that often the awareness is not there about what sort of resources exist externally and internally from public domain and other resources. So we were able to articulate them from export revenues to tax revenues to development assistance to other sources that we did not even thought about which include some of specialised funds that are available and in fact improving the business environment in order to encourage the inflow of investment.  The second constraint was the issues relating to institutional and issues of lack of capacity to be able to access and use these resources. Concretely, we were able to say what we can do to strengthen the institutions that are critical for assessing and utilising development resources but also to say what we can do to build the capacity needed by countries especially with regard to the technical expertise so that African countries can negotiate better and prepare project that can be fundable in order to benefit from the resources and then they can also be able to access these resources. Last constraint was about the oversight and monitoring and evaluation dimension which will require strengthening parliament, strengthening oversight organisation so that they will make sure that there is prudent management of  resources that are already available which will help to even attract more resources.

Realnews: Why did ACBF pick building Capacity and Mobilising Resources for Africa’s Transformation as the theme of its 26^th annual meeting of the board of governors?

Nnadozie: It is very important because we believe that getting resources for development is one of the challenges African countries are facing. You can have very sound strategies and plans; you can also have very good ideas but if you don’t have the means of turning these good ideas into results then you are not getting anywhere. You will only have fancy plan without any results. And many people have been talking about mobilising resources but they ignore, in our view, some very obvious things. When I discussed with development partners and those who support development:  ‘they say but we made we gave them $200m for infrastructure development. After three years they won’t even spend $10 million of that. They won’t even utilise it, infrastructure is not built’. But when you ask African countries they say: ‘well, the development partner often put stringent conditions, or their processes are so complex, they make things difficult”. So for us we think ACBF as a capacity building institution ought to really bring this issue to the table and bring both sides to the table to have both sides to have a way of discussing how to address these issues so that available resources are productively and judiciously utilised to achieve the result that we want.

Realnews: Would you see African countries cooperating to work with you and how are you going to deal with those may be trying to resist working with ACBF?

Nnadozie: ACBF belongs to African countries so they cannot resist working with us. As we speak right now 41 African countries are full-fledged members of ACBF and ACBF is in 45 African countries supporting them and we intend to be in 54 African countries, all of them, supporting every African country. So the ownership is already there. The point is that we want them to strengthen their support for ACBF – both political and financial support. There will not be the question of any resistance from benefiting from our programmes, projects and financing. Afterall, we are there to support, not to compete, not to antagonise but rather to ensure that countries have the ability to use their resources to achieve their development objectives.

Realnews:  In the morning you talked about mobilising $250 million to help build critical capacity needed by African countries for development. How are you going to achieve this?

Nnadozie: You know, in our estimates from the ambitious project, strategy that we have in the next five years. It’s ambitious in terms of vision but it is conservative in terms of what we estimate because in terms of the huge need of capacity, it is far more than that. In fact, when ACBF was created in 1991, it was estimated that the Foundation be given $1 billion in order to make a dent in the capacity challenges in the continent. But we have learnt after 25 or 26 years that mobilising that resource may be difficult because so far we have invested almost $700 million dollars. So for us now we say in the next five years, conservatively, we will need about N250 million if we are really to help African countries  -a) to be able to implement the first 10 years of the Agenda 2063; b) to have the capacity to achieved the sustainable development goals; and to help countries to implement their own development plans. So this is the estimates that we have put in place and we intend to mobilised that from various sources. Of course, African countries are members and contribute to ACBF but what they contribute is not nearly enough to make a dent in that resource envelop. So we need to mobilise the same ways we are doing it from other sources internally and externally, from bilateral and multi-lateral agencies, donors internally and externally and from other fee for service that we are going to do. So we also generate our own revenue as well. It’s not just simply grants that we get but also by providing knowledge and sharing that knowledge, forming partnerships with various stakeholders and partners to mobilise resources.

Realnews: What will be the big take away from this meeting?

Nnadozie:  The big take away is that ACBF has made commitment now to establish a programme that will help African countries address the issue of access to and absorption of development resources. And this will help to map what resources are available; to look into what are the constraints that they face and what strategies can we use to remove those constraints, whether to strengthen the institutions or build their capacities to access, utilise and absorb these resources. But we also want to help them to strenghthen their overall oversight mechanisms, technical areas such as procurement which will help them to become more attractive, areas concerning monitoring and evaluation and areas concerning financial management and control because all those will positively reflect on countries and make them become attractive for either investments or for absorbing and utilising development assistance.

– Sept 5, 2017 @ 11:25 GMT