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UN workshop in Kenya looks at finding $64 billion for Africa's development

UN workshop in Kenya looks at finding $64 billion for Africa's development

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Difficulties mobilizing development resources for Africa and ways of improving the continent's financial systems are being discussed at a workshop in Kenya this week coordinated by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA).

Experts attending the Nairobi meeting, held from 1 to 3 November, are seeking to identify how African countries can garner the $64 billion in new investment needed to generate a growth rate of 7 per cent and meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) designed to halve extreme poverty by 2015.

Nii Wallace-Bruce, workshop coordinator and senior economist at the ECA's Economic and Social Policy Division, said the funds could come in a number of ways. "These resources can be generated either domestically, through increased domestic savings and improvements in public revenue collection systems, or from external sources."

In several countries, however, opportunities for engendering domestic development funding are hampered by a lack of skilled workers, inadequate infrastructure and high levels of illness and death in the population due to HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, ECA said.

In extreme cases, political disintegration has led to armed conflicts, draining resources and adding disincentives to domestic and foreign investment, the Commission said.

According to the data available, between 2000 and 2003 only seven of the 53 African countries reached the desired GDP growth rate of at least 7 per cent, while 22 countries achieved only half of that rate. Thirteen countries showed a decline.

Participants represented the African Development Bank, the African Union (AU), ministries of finance, economic planning, justice and health, as well as central banks, universities, non-bank financial institutions, stock exchanges, securities and exchange commissions and social security insurance departments.