Responses: Dr. BT Costantinos, Chair, African Centre for Humanitarian Action (Ethiopia)

The IMF, World Bank, multilateral, bilateral and non-governmental external agencies have, in recent years, introduced a large number of initiatives aimed directly or indirectly at helping Africa "develop" its way out of economic chaos and political instability. In doing so, they rely on a wide variety of programmes, institutional mechanisms and policies. Indeed, growing external involvement in African projects of democratisation and economic recovery has resulted in increasingly challenging problems of conceptualising and understanding the role and function of international agencies. The effectiveness of political conditionality is a function of the dependence of a recipient government on foreign aid. Government compliance with donor conditions varies with the type of policy reform. Compliance is "high for measures that can be implemented by a small number of central government officials and low for reforms requiring extensive institutional change". The imposition by donors of political conditions on aid disbursements is alone insufficient to effect democratic political transitions, i.e. in the absence of organised domestic constituencies for political change within the state and within civil society. Intervention by international organisations disrupts developmental and democratic transitions to the extent that it is perceived as partisan.

The growth of foreign interventions seems in marked contrast to the limited thought and effort exerted by democratisers of African polity to put the interventions in coherent theoretical or strategic perspective. The following questions could be posed in this regard:      

1. What is the overall rationality or significance of the great traffic of international programs and projects of democratisation and development in Africa, the proliferating activities that seem to show little regard for economy of co-ordination?
2. How far and in what ways do various international agencies, programs, mechanisms, forms of knowledge and technical assistance feed on one another in helping set the boundaries of democratic reform in Africa. 

The important issues that these questions suggest are not sufficiently addressed, or even raised, in much of the current discussion of the G20 or the G8. Insofar as the activities of external agencies in Africa are not understood and engaged in, their democratic and developmental impact may diminish with their proliferation.  This can mean little more than a weakly coordinated multiplication of programs and projects which have immediately recognizable or measurable effects in limited areas, but which seem to suspend rather than serve the ultimate goals of democratisation of African political systems. The strategic co-ordination of diverse international activities supportive of development in Africa can become a challenge both for the international agencies involved and for the Governments. This is in part because of limitations in the individual characteristics of the activities - for example, their narrowly technocratic orientation. It is also because of shortcomings in the relational and contextual articulation of external programs and projects, their limited generalisability and variability.

African governments and societies undoubtedly depend on international assistance in their projects of reform. Such assistance is vital for the projects in many areas and at many levels. Yet, it must be recognized that external support creates problems as well as opportunities for Africa. In confronting the imperatives of change, nothing is more challenging for our polities than the strategic coordination of diverse global and local elements, relations and activities within themselves, nor has anything greater potential for enabling them to achieve successful transitions to democracy and development.
On the questions/ Issues for Discussion, our response is outlined below.

Effectiveness of the IMF
The IMF response to the current crisis and recent food/fuel shocks has not been effective. The IMF,  with its heavy bureaucracy,  has not addressed in an effective and timely way the challenges facing LICs, particularly in relation to programme design, review and available finance financing.

Conditionality
Similarly, the recent reforms to conditionality have not been factored into individual LIC programmes. There is little and ineffective advice and review of programmes.

Concessional facilities
The proposed reform of Fund concessional facilities has the potential to better meet the diverse needs of LICs. However, the IMF, working only with governments to large degree, has not been designed in way to address fragile and post-conflict states.

Strengthening the IMF’s response
Broader consultation with academia, think tanks and civil society leaders is required to ensure that reforms of these facilities maintain a core focus on economic transformation and poverty reduction that would have an outreach beyond the current crisis response. In this sense, the proposed reform of the Exogenous Shocks Facility (ESF) to a Stand By Credit Facility on less concessional terms could be appropriate only in effective states and where there is a highly engaged private sector and civil society.