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| UN Secretary General Kofi Annan Address to the U.S.-Africa Ministerial Conference, Washington, DC, March 16, 1999
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It is a special pleasure for me to join you today to help give new energy and new promise to Africa's struggle for peace and development. Let me begin, therefore, by paying tribute to Secretary Albright and the entire Administration for hosting this U.S.-Africa Ministerial Conference. It is vivid and vital testimony to your commitment to improving not only Africa's present, but also its future; to enhancing not only Africa's economic prospects, but also its political fortunes; to transforming not only Africa's image, but also its reality.
What makes this conference remarkable and gives me genuine hope is that it addresses Africa's challenges at the core:
- Integrating Africa into the global economy;
- Addressing the issue of trade and market access;
- Confronting the reality of Africa's debt burden;
- Recognizing the link between political and economic liberalization;
- Ensuring good governance and transparency at all levels; and
- Investing in Africa's human capacity through education for all.
The close of the 20th century presents Africa with unprecedented challenges and opportunities. Rapid technological change and the globalization of trade, investment, and financial markets are making dramatic progress possible. Globalization has brought opportunities for expansion into new products and new markets, as well as a new focus on competition and efficiency. Of course, this is not to imply that the experience with globalization has been universally positive. We need only to look at the consequences of the crisis in Asia to know how quickly opportunity can turn to disaster.
In the early 1990s, many African countries introduced political and economic reforms. Political systems opened up, and higher commodity prices helped bring economic recovery. These prospects are now at best uncertain. Commodity prices have fallen, old conflicts have flared up again, new ones have emerged. Limited and fragile achievements are being undermined. This conference is taking place not a day too soon.
In my tenure as Secretary General of the United Nations, I have sought to make African security and development key priorities of the work of the world organization. Last April, I submitted my report on Africa to the Security Council, a report that grew out of a Security Council meeting chaired by Secretary Albright.
In that report, I underlined the reality that any and all efforts at securing peace had to be combined with steps towards ending Africa's poverty and emphasized the need for a comprehensive response to a comprehensive challenge. Specifically, I called for the promotion of investment and economic growth; of ensuring adequate levels of international aid; of reducing debt burdens and opening international markets to Africa's products.
I also urged development partners to increase the volume and quality of official development assistance -- ODA. Let there be no doubt: the decline in ODA must be reversed. We must reward those countries which are on the verge of reaping the fruits of painful adjustment. Moreover, we must find ways of ensuring that ODA complements private investment. To provide an enabling environment for foreign investment and to increase their competitiveness, African countries have made remarkable progress in regional integration.
But we all know that no private investors -- not the most far-sighted multinational corporation, nor yet the most patriotic African -- are going to risk their hard-won capital in a chronically insecure neighbourhood. Without political stability and a predictable environment, neither private investment nor development assistance can take root or make a lasting difference.
I said when I delivered my report on Africa to the United Nations Security Council last April, and I say to you again today: for too long, conflict and poverty in Africa have been seen as inevitable or intractable, or both. They are neither. Conflict and poverty in Africa can and have been defeated -- with imagination, persistence, patience and, above all, will.
While the burden of responsibility for Africa's fate lies in African hands, Africa's development partners can also do more and do better to help Africa in its struggle for lasting prosperity. As Africa confronts the universal challenges of peace and development, we know that these must be met with a sure sense of Africa's realities.
Yes, we must have African solutions to African problems. But let us never forget that the test of those solutions is not in their origins, but in their results; not in who provides the solutions, but whether they provide lasting peace and equitable prosperity. That we can provide those answers, together and in partnership, now and in the future, I have no doubt.
Africa's extraordinary human and material resources, the resilience and humanity of its peoples, the increased education of its youth and its growing appreciation for the rule of law -- all these offer a potential without equal in the continent's history.
To seize this opportunity, Africa needs its partnership with America to be as profound in its consequences as it is admirable in its aspiration. We need only to look to the last half century of European and Asian development to see what is possible when America commits its strength, its resources, its will, and its generosity. By doing so in the Africa of tomorrow, America can help create a new world of peace and prosperity -- for its partners and for itself. I wish to congratulate you again for this initiative and wish you all success.
[end of document]
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