New York, 19 October 2017 (ECA) - As part of the series of activities held during Africa Week and on the margins of the UN General Assembly Debate on Africa’s development, a briefing session was convened for the members of the United Nations Interdepartmental Task Force on African Affairs (IDTFAA). The interactive session is considered a major opportunity for the African Union Commission, NEPAD Agency, the Economic Commission for Africa and the Africa Peer Review Mechanism to brief the United Nations system entities on ways to further strengthen institutional partnerships and ensure the effective implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and Agenda 2063.
Speaking on behalf of the ECA, Ms. Aida Opoku-Mensah, Special Advisor on SDGS stressed the need to prioritize development interventions that are based on evidence and policy modeling as a means to identify the kind of policies, which have the greatest multisectoral impacts. “Evidence-based policymaking also ensures more accurate targeting of interventions at those most likely to be left behind,” she said.
Ms. Opoku-Mensah also highlighted the need for integrated reporting on the SDGs and Agenda 2063 as a way to minimize duplication and ensure coherence. She touched on a regional results framework that is being developed by the AUC and ECA towards achieving this objective.
She also took the opportunity to highlight the collaborative work done by the ECA, UNDP and the African Development Bank (AfDB) in producing the first African Sustainable Development Report, which simultaneously tracks progress on both the SDGs and Agenda 2063.
For his part, Bartholomew Armah, Chief of the Renewal of Planning Section in the Macro-Policy Division of the ECA stressed the need for horizontal coherence in the context of existing interlinkages among international development agendas. This coherence, he said, is a first step towards integrating the agendas in national and subnational development plans (vertical coherence). He informed the session of the ECA's Integrated Planning and Reporting Tool, which helps countries track progress on both development agendas and facilitates the coherent integration of both in national development plans. The tool is being piloted in Uganda, Gambia, Sierra Leone, Zambia, and Congo.
Mr. Eddie Maloka, who heads the APRM secretariat made a presentation on key deliverables, highlighting the work with the ECA in providing technical assistance to all external reviews in 20 countries. Djibouti, Senegal, Chad, and Kenya held peer-reviews in January of this year. In collaboration with the ECA, a team of experts on land, political governance and contract negotiation would be sent to Uganda for the country’s second external review. Furthermore, ECA has contributed to the revision of the initial APRM questionnaires. More work is ongoing, focused on tracking governance and establishment of new methodologies. In addition, a crisis mission, the first of its kind will be held in Lesotho, with ECA providing a team of experts.
The interactive session with the United Nations Interdepartmental Task Force on African Affairs (IDTFAA) was attended by delegations from member states and principles of AUC, Regional Economic Communities (RECs,), the NEPAD Agency and APRM. The event was moderated by both the acting Under-Secretary-General and Special Adviser on Africa in his capacity as the convener of the IDTFAA and Mr. Tete Antonio, the Permanent Observer of the African Union to the United Nations.
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