Addis Ababa, 29 March 2015 (ECA) - "When all our children have the same opportunity for survival, for nutrition and for education; when our youth have equal opportunity for employment; when households are able to maintain their families free of poverty; and when our elderly can enjoy their golden years decently, thus we will have achieved inclusive development in Africa".
Through these words, ECA Executive Secretary Carlos Lopes highlighted the need to ensure African growth is transformed to become sufficiently inclusive, equitable and sustainable.
To attain inclusive development while responding to the paradox of African growth, which allowed economies to grow vigorously without achieving structural changes, ECA has launched a tool to measure inclusive development and social transformation, and ensure economic development translates into well being for African populations.
This tool -The African Social Development Index (ASDI) - helps African countries track progress made towards the reduction of human exclusion, to identify specific social challenges and thus develop equitable and inclusive social policies.
Speaking at the launch of ASDI, Ms. Takyiwaa Manuk, Director of the ECA Social Development Policy Division, recalled that when the UN was founded in 1945, member states had agreed to place people at the centre of development processes and therefore that our growth and interventions should do the same.
Manuk explained that the ASDI has been developed to reflect the specific and multidimensional challenges of Africa. "Using a life cycle approach, the index aims to assess the depth of human exclusion in key dimensions of wellbeing including health, education, employment productive income and decent life", she said.
She further added that ASDI can be applied to national and sub-regional levels to capture rate of inequalities within and between countries and population groups".
ECA Economic Affairs Officer Iris Macculi explained that one of the key points about ASDI is not only that it produces results but that it makes it possible to interpret them and map social policies with positive impacts.
"ASDI could be one of the main reference policy tools to monitor social policies and identify their effectiveness towards the implementation of AU agenda 2056 and ultimately to try and guide budget allocation in social sectors across the continent".
Why another index?
As for the value added of ASDI compared to already existing international and regional indexes, Macculi stressed that ASDI is the only one that reflects African development challenges in their specific context.
Another ASDI specificity is the disaggregation of data by subgroup levels. "The same index could be disaggregated between men and women of the same country depending on their geographical locations. For example, the person who was born and raised in rural area might suffer from exclusion challenges which cannot be found in cities" explained Macculi.
Participants to the meeting expressed satisfaction about ASDI as "This tool will help bring growth to a much deeper level, make it sustainable and lead to the creation of decent jobs" said Yaw Ansu, Chief Economist at African center for Economic Transformation.
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