The Exchange - East Africa's Source for Financial News The Exchange MAY 2017 - FINAL (1) | Page 23

MAY 2017
T
he
commodities
downturn
has revealed the fragility and
structural weaknesses of many
African economies. With fast-growing
populations, African states are under
intense pressure to deliver for their
citizens. At the same time, austerity is
impacting Africa’s traditional donors,
with foreign governments focused on
domestic priorities rather than overseas
largesse.
Meanwhile, climate change and income
inequality are fuelling conflict and
migration and creating new humanitarian
challenges. As David Miliband, President
and CEO of the International Rescue
Committee, has noted, ‘the scale and
complexity of current humanitarian
needs are increasingly out of step with the
resources, policies and practices available
to meet them.’
It is clear to us that we need a new
approach to development. We need to
rethink the role of the State and the
contribution of donors and the private
sector to sustainable development. We need
progressive new compacts which engage
all actors to solve the continent’s toughest,
most intractable development challenges
together. We have the frameworks to guide
this. The Sustainable Development Goals
alone contain 17 goals and 169 targets.
In our view enterprises have a vital
role to play in development. They are
skilled at delivering public goods and
services and can often be held more
accountable than governments. In our
view governments must understand their
limitations and recognise that they alone
don’t hold the solutions. Countries like
Botswana realised this long ago and have
managed to create inclusive growth by
enshrining cooperation and conversation
with industry and civil society in the
enforcement of mining laws, for example,
to generate shared value for society
from its diamond wealth. Rwanda holds
23.
Positive Impact - a new
development model for Africa
Marcus Courage is founder and Chief Executive Officer of Africa
Practice Ltd, a strategic ad-visory firm. Photo source: iytmg.com Patrick Utomi is a Nigerian professor of political economy
and management expert. Photo source: iytmg.com
some lessons for us too. The discipline
introduced into its development planning
process now extends to the use of data and
evidence from industry and civil society
for policy-making.
Across the board, we need to encourage
greater collaboration and greater pooling
of evidence from governments, donors,
private sector and NGOs in order to
determine which policies deliver the
greatest positive impact. At the heart of
this needs to be a focus on the beneficiaries
- the people who all too often are passive
recipients rather than active participants in the development process.
We need to focus on measuring not just
outcomes but impact - not how many
classrooms were built or teachers hired
but how many children are receiving a
quality education and building relevant
skills and knowledge they can deploy
productively in decent jobs. Defining these
collective goals – through the Sustainable
Development Goals framework – and
creating clear accountability around each
actor’s part in achieving the goal, needs to
be given much more focus.
New coalitions of donors, corporates,
governments and civil society, powered
by new mod-els of blended finance,
offer fresh solutions to old problems.
By freeing parties from the restraints of
their traditional roles each actor can be
encouraged to bring their full skill set,
networks and technologies to bear. This
is about solving the thorniest market
failures and the most intractable social
challenges, which in turn will create more
predictable operating environments and a
larger addressable consumer market for
industry - critical factors for job creation
on a massive scale.
We are advocating for a new development
model which looks at the contribution of
diverse partners to deliver positive impact
and to solve different aspects of a complex
problem. This might be stimulating
agricultural production in northern
Zambia or it might be cleaning up the
Niger Delta and creating sustainable
income-generation
opportunities
for
communities. That is the model we need in
Africa today, and a model that Africa can
export to the rest of the world.
Marcus Courage and Patrick Utomi were
in conversation at the inaugural Positive
Impact Summit hosted by Palladium.
Marcus Courage is founder and Chief Executive
Officer of Africa Practice Ltd, a strategic advisory
firm. He is Director of Alkebulan Ltd.
Patrick Utomi is a Nigerian professor of political
economy and management expert. He is a Fellow
of the Institute of Management Consultants of
Nigeria and a former presidential candidate.