Abstract:
This brief epilogue accompanies the case "The New Partnership for Africa's Development" (1693.0) and describes NEPAD's near-term impact. The disappointing rate of economic growth in post-colonial Africa has perplexed both that continent's leaders and major international aid and finance institutions. A wide variety of approaches--including the "parastatal" socialism of Tanzania, import substitution regimes, and the structural adjustment framework of the International Monetary Fund--have been largely ineffective in improving the standard of living of the world's poorest continent. This case tells the story of an effort undertaken at the turn of the new millennium in 2000 to bring Africa into the global trading system through a new approach aimed at attracting not only aid from developed countries but substantial private capital, or "foreign direct investment." The New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD), a compact organized by a group of five democratically-elected African leaders--led by President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa--pledged a combination of human rights and property rights protection, enforced through an innovative "peer review," through which African nations would seek to ensure that such rights took hold and continued. The case describes both the rationale for NEPAD and the process through which it was developed, as well as the serious critiques of both the compact and the process, many of which were advanced by non-governmental citizen organizations from a wide range of African countries. The case also highlights the particular challenge posed by the Zimbabwe government of the increasingly authoritarian Robert Mugabe, in the context of the NEPAD peer review approach.
