Building Bridges out of Poverty How can infrastructure development strengthen regional integration to overcome poverty in southern Africa? This policy brief looks at the potential of Southern Africa’s regional infrastructure intervention’s to achieve the overall objective to provide support to regional integration and contribute to poverty eradication. It also identifies knowledge and policy gaps that may exist with a view to recommend interventions to address them. The brief examines the transport, energy, water, and financing components of the regional infrastructure interventions.

The 2006 SADC Summit:
A Review of the Process and Its Outcomes with Special Reference to Poverty Reduction

Introduction

Since the transformation of the Southern African Development Coordination Conference (SADCC) into the Southern African Development Community (SADC) in 1992, efforts towards development integration have been accelerated in Southern Africa, although serious challenges still remain in particular in redressing the social scourge of the pervasive poverty. Currently, SADC has committed itself to the following milestones of regional integration:

Progress towards achieving a free trade area in 2008 is slow and a number of SADC member states are yet to meet agreed targets towards this objective.

The latest Summit of Heads of State and Government of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) was held in Maseru, Lesotho between 17 & 18 August 2006. The Summit is the highest policy-making organ of SADC. As with previous Summits especially since the past three years, the main focus of the 2006 Summit revolved around the progress and challenges in the implementation of the two major policy frameworks that underpin current efforts towards regional integration namely (a) the Regional Indicative Strategic Development Plan (RISDP) and (b) the Strategic Indicative Plan of the Organ on Politics, Defence and Security Cooperation (SIPO). The former is meant to drive the socio-economic integration of the Southern Africa region, while the latter is a framework for regional political and security cooperation.

This article is a critical review of the 2006 SADC Summit process and its outcomes with special reference to commitment of SADC member states towards poverty reduction. It is worth noting from the on-set that a key element of the SADC Common Agenda adopted in Windhoek, Namibia in 1992 is to “ensure that poverty eradication is addressed in all SADC activities and programmes”(SADC, 2003:6). The two major objectives RISDP are to (a) accelerate poverty eradication and (a) attain other economic and non-economic development goals

by fostering deep (or developmental) integration within the context of accelerated globalization. It is behind this backdrop that we should understand the significance of the 2006 SADC Summit in Maseru.

The 2006 SADC Summit and its Outcomes

As would be expected, the 2006 SADC Summit focused the deliberations of the Heads of State and Government on the implementation of the organisation’s two major plans outlined above (namely RISDP and SIPO). Noting slow progress in the implementation of both the RISDP and SIPO, the Heads of State and Government recognize “the need to scale up the implementation of SADC integration agenda, and reiterated that the RISDP and SIPO are the main instruments in this regard. To this end, the Summit established a Task Force comprising Ministers responsible for Finance, Investment, Economic Development, Trade and Industry to work with the Secretariat with a view to defining the road map for eradicating poverty and propose measures for fast-tracking implementation. They directed the Task Force to report to the Extra Ordinary Summit to be held not later than October 2006” (SADC, 2006:3) in Maseru, Lesotho.  

The slow progress in the implementation of the RISDP is not surprising given that SADC is reputed for adopting progressive protocols and declarations, but extremely poor in implementing them. Presently, SADC has signed and/or ratified more than 23 protocols whose implementation remains questionable. Thus, while SADC is certainly one of the most active regional integration schemes in Africa, it still has to address the yawning gap between rhetoric and reality. In other words, SADC needs to translate agreed declarations and protocols into implementable policies that in the final analysis redress poverty. For instance, while the fourteen member states of SADC commit themselves to achieving economic growth of 7% by 2008, only Angola (14%), Mozambique (7.5%) and Tanzania (about 7%) have made progress in this area. The rest of the other SADC member states, including South Africa, exhibit a poor economic performance with Zimbabwe experiencing negative economic growth.  Without economic growth, there cannot be development and without development it is not possible for SADC states to redress poverty. However, economic growth, in and of itself, is not sufficient in addressing poverty, given that it is perfectly possible to have growth without increased social welfare of the majority of the populations.

Top on the list of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to which all SADC member states have committed themselves is the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger by 2015. Prospects for SADC member states to achieve this goal are extremely bleak. The poverty situation in the SADC region is a serious policy challenge for Southern African states individually and collectively as depicted in the table below.

Table 1: Incidence of Human Poverty in the SADC Region

Source: UNDP/SADC/SAPES, 2000.

From the table above, it is clear that poverty presents a major policy challenge in Southern Africa. This problem is much more pronounced in Zambia and less so in Mauritius. Besides poverty, the other major social problem confronting the SADC region is surely the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which among other things ravages livelihoods and reduces longevity of life in many SADC countries as table 2 below clearly demonstrates.

Table 2: HIV/AIDS Prevalence Rate in SADC (2003 figures)

Source: UNAIDS, 2004:189-207

HIV/AIDS prevalence rate is more pronounced in the three small states of Swaziland (38.8%), Botswana (37.3%) and Lesotho (28.8%) and less so in Madagascar (1.7%), Angola (3.9%) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (4.2%). In 2003, during its extra-ordinary Summit held in Maseru, Lesotho, SADC adopted the Maseru Declaration on Combating HIV and AIDS and in line with this declaration a regional HIV/AIDS Fund was established. However, by the time of the 2006 SADC Summit only two SADC member states had made financial contributions to the fund namely South Africa and Lesotho. The rest of the other members had not yet contributed to this important fund. Again, this is another demonstration of lack of political commitment in implementing important socio-economic initiatives aimed at deepening regional integration. This lackluster attitude of SADC member states towards dealing with the HIV/AIDS scourge head-on prompted the Civil Society Forum hosted jointly by the SADC-Council of Non-governmental Organisations and the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa (EISA) held in Maseru on 14-16 August 2006 ahead of the SADC Summit to call upon SADC states to:

Unless SADC member states demonstrate sufficient political will (closing the gap between rhetoric and reality), not will SADC fail to achieve its first milestone of a free trade area by 2008, but alleviation of poverty (let alone eradication) will remain a distant mirage.

Conclusion

Although concerted effort has been made towards development integration in Southern Africa since the transformation of SADCC into SADC in 1992, major challenges still remain particularly in relation to poverty reduction. SADC member states have excelled in signing many progressive declarations, but failed dismally in translating these declarations and protocols into implementable policy initiatives. Lack of commitment by member states is also demonstrated by outstanding financial contributions to SADC coffers as demonstrated in table 3 below.

Table 3: SADC Member States Contributions, 2006/07 (USD)