58. In the light of ongoing efforts by international, regional and national actors to combat poverty and rising inequality, and the international, regional and national laws and protocols that underpin those efforts, highlight up to five new actions and/or programmes to be undertaken by governments (central, provincial, municipal and traditional); the private sector (domestic and foreign); civil sector organizations (non-governmental organizations, trade unions and academia); development partners, such as regional and international financial institutions, and the United Nations; and regional economic communities, such as the Common Markey for Eastern and Southern Africa, the East African Community and SADC:
(i) Actions by governments
• Strengthen policy frameworks on inequality, such as on decent job creation and redistribu-tion
• Allocate sufficient resources for poverty and inequality reduction programmes
• Decentralize decision-making and ensure that requisite structures are in place
• Effectively coordinate interventions and actors to maximize their impact in the fight against poverty and inequality
• Establish monitoring and evaluation mechanisms and frameworks to strengthen account-ability
• Enhance the capacity of local organs to implement, monitor and evaluate policies on pov-erty and inequality
• Establish platforms to strengthen public participation programmes to foster transparency and accountability
• Design government procurement policies to promote job creation for citizens, particularly in government infrastructure and development programmes
• Adopt a long-term vision on tackling poverty and inequality through job creation, building on the good practices established by Mauritius
(ii) Actions by the private sector:
• Ensure that companies comply with tax laws and pay taxes
• Strengthen private sector corporate social responsibility and empower local communities through backward and forward linkages to the local economy
• Ensure that information on compliance is shared among counties’ tax regimes
• Promote private sector reinvestment of profits locally to create more jobs
• Encourage investors to promote meaningful skills transfer with a view to strengthening local skills pools
• Promote labour-intensive production methods to ensure a human face in economic activity
• Ensure that the private sector complies with global and local labour laws
• Encourage the private sector to explore public-private partnerships with a view to maximiz-ing the private and social impact of their business activities
(iii) Actions by civil society
• Strengthen the means by which citizens can hold Governments and the private sector ac-countable
• Strengthen the capacity of civil society to call for change and hold stakeholders accountable
• Adopt appropriate statutory or self-regulatory frameworks for civil society organizations
• Enhance collaboration among civil society organizations, government agencies, the private sector and development partners
• Support policy-focused and relevant research among academia
• Integrate academia into the poverty and inequality reduction agenda through participation in related policy debates and formulations
• Establish effective think tanks within academic institutions (iv) Actions by development partners
• Invest in science and technology, and in vocational training, with a view to enhancing the skills of young people and women, and, as life expectancy among members of the middle class has improved, to enhance the skills of early retirees
• Provide financial support to young people and women to enable them to raise the necessary collateral to qualify for loans
• Reinvest profits into agricultural productivity and value addition
• Support governance initiatives that strengthen inclusivity
• Fund research that is relevant to policymakers
• Invest in capacity-building in member States, including in the area of public financial man-agement
• Scale up successful best practices
• Enhance the coordination of initiatives that reduce the compliance burden of recipients in accordance with, among others, the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and the out-comes of the Third and Fourth High-level Forums on Aid Effectiveness.
(v) Regional economic commissions
• Promote implementation of existing resolutions, including by establishing mechanisms to measure progress towards implementation
• Focus on market size and integration
3. Agenda items 9 and 10: Conclusions and recommendations
59. The experts discussed and adopted the amended workshop outcome statement. The full statement is attached as annex I to this report. The experts stressed that the background document and other workshop documents should be finalized quickly and submitted to policymakers as soon as possible.
4. Agenda item 11: Closure of the workshop
60. The Chair thanked ECA for the opportunity to participate in the meeting and the participants for their lively discussions and contributions. He also noted with appreciation the confidence extended by the participants to Zambia and his election as Chair of the workshop, a role which he believed that he had carried out to the best of his ability. He urged ECA to promote
implementation of the recommendations of the workshop to ensure that they strengthened efforts to tackle inequality and reduce poverty among members States and the subregion as a whole. He concluded by urging participants to continue to network on the issues discussed at the workshop.
61. Speaking on behalf of the United Nations Country Teams, Mr. George Lwanda expressed his appreciation for the active involvement of the experts in the discussions. He reassured the workshop participants that the organizations involved in arranging the workshop would continue to work to ensure that the document was completed rapidly and disseminated to the uppermost echelons of national and regional policymakers. He invited the experts to spread the messages articulated during the workshop in their respective countries and within their national organizations to ensure the mainstreaming of the fight against inequality.
62. In his closing remarks, the Director of the Subregional Office for Southern Africa, Mr. Said Adejumobi, expressed his gratitude to the experts for their insightful and engaging discussions and to the Chair and the rapporteur for effectively guiding the meeting. He also expressed gratitude to the Government of Zambia for the support extended in hosting the workshop.
63. Mr. Adejumobi commended the consultant for a high quality report, which would be updated with input from the workshop. He also promised to take forward the work of ECA on the African Social Development Index, finalize and publish the workshop report, prepare a policy brief on the basis of the report, organize policy dialogue on issues emanating from the report and disseminate the report and bring salient issues to the attention of policymakers in member States and the subregion. He encouraged experts to engage ECA on other ways of taking the recommendations of the report forward to achieve maximum results, narrow inequality and reduce poverty.