Capacity Building Workshop – Addis Ababa, 14 November 2007
ECA Press Release No. 17/2007
Addis Ababa, 09 November 2007(ECA) – The Trade, Finance and Economic Development (TFED) division of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) is organizing a “ Policy analysis capacity building workshop for technical officials of ministries and central banks ” on 14 November 2007, at the UN Conference Centre, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The key objective of the meeting is to contribute to an improvement in p olicy targeting to accelerate growth, create employment, and achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in Africa.
This capacity building workshop is the last in a series of meetings that have been convened in the context of a United Nations Development Account project on “ Knowledge networking and sharing in a south-south partnership framework to strengthen the capacity of African policy community towards meeting key MDGs ”. ECA and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean have jointly launched this project, which aims to bridge the gap between researchers and policy makers in order to accelerate progress towards achieving the MDGs.
The overall objective of the workshop is to enhance the capacity of national organs to work towards realization of MDGs through better policy targeting and execution and better alignment of national policies and programmes. Specific objectives include identification of capacity constraints to policy making as well as discussion of employment- and MDG-sensitive macro- economic models.
Knowledge is a vital ingredient and a principal driver of economic growth and development. In other words, the success or failure of nations hinge to a great extent upon their ability to adequately use knowledge in addressing their development challenges. Unfortunately, the increasing amount of Africa-specific development research is presently not being systematically assembled, shared and applied to deal with the continent's development challenges and to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.
At issue is the weak connection between the knowledge producers—African centres of excellence and research institutions and networks—on the one hand - and African policy makers—the end users—on the other. This is creating a gap between the potential and actual impact of Africa-specific research on African policymaking. In addition, to date, many of the policy recommendations of African research institutions lack a solid technical basis in terms of quantitative evidence (e.g. in terms of quantitative models), and this is limiting their credibility with policy makers.
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Issued by the ECA Information and Communication Service P.O. Box 3001
Addis Ababa Ethiopia
Tel: 251 11 5445098 Fax: +251 11 5510365 E-mail: ecainfo@uneca.org Web: www.uneca.org
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