World Bank President Robert Zoellick ruffled feathers across the economics profession in late September, when he challenged economists to incorporate greater input from experts in poor countries into future research and ensuing development recommendations. Zoellick’s message was manna from heaven for Frannie Léautier, a former high-ranking World Bank official whose mission these days focuses largely on improving economic policy analysis within Africa.
>> Robert Zoellick’s Development Economics Speech Spurs Debate
Léautier is the executive secretary of the African Capacity Building Foundation, an independent organization based in Harare, Zimbabwe, that has worked since 1991 to build local expertise in skills considered essential for future development. ACBF’s capacity-building agenda ranges from training government officials in financial management and statistical systems to boosting the role of parliaments and helping non-governmental organizations acquire the intellectual tools needed to hold elected officials accountable.
“Previously, investments in capacity building came from the outside,” Léautier told Devex during an interview on the sidelines of ACBF’s 19th annual board of governors meeting in Paris in late September. “But in order to really get transformation, you need endogenous change – from within. That’s why our foundation was conceived to be 100 percent African.”
ACBF classifies its capacity-building work into six broad categories:
- Strengthening economic policy analysis and management. - Improving public administration and management. - Promoting skills development for financial management and administration, notably debt management and central bank operations. - Professionalizing the voices of the private sector and civil society. - Strengthening the policy analysis capacity of national parliaments. - Strengthening and monitoring national statistics.
A maker of African development leaders
Since its inception, the foundation has funded 233 projects in 44 countries. Its most notable work has been the creation of several high-level economic policy programs based at African universities that have contributed to the development of a new financially savvy African leadership elite. These programs boast more than 3,000 alumni that include central bank governors, finance ministers and country representatives to the World Bank and African Development Bank.
“These people are the transformative change for the continent,” Léautier said.
A second key program was the creation of 27 independent think tanks across Africa, whose experts are today capable of meeting Zoellick’s call for greater North-South economic policy cooperation. The think tank program runs the gamut from semiautonomous centers that work with governments – like Uganda’s Economic Policy Research Institute or the Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis – to fully independent institutions such as the Economic and Social Research Foundation in Tanzania or the Center for Policy Analysis in Ghana.
“The creation of these autonomous policy units and think tanks was very important, because prior to this, there was not a single independent think tank in Africa,” Léautier said. “We knew we would need to have a group of people who actually thought about the long term and who were not impacted by changes in government or changes in political cycles.”
Beyond the macroeconomic policy training and think tanks, ACBF has invested heavily in projects designed to improve government functioning, both internally and externally.
“We’ve invested in public administration and management, which means training people in good public sector skills, to do the day-to-day work of government,” Léautier said. “But we’ve also seen that if you don’t have accountability, then nothing really changes. So, we invested in supporting accountability systems, especially media and societal groups that serve an oversight function.”
Partnership with African Union
In July this year, ACBF entered into a landmark agreement with the African Union. The memorandum of understanding, which was signed in the margins of the AU summit in Kampala, Uganda, focuses on common objectives of the AU and ACBF, such as promoting regional trade and regional economic communities like the East African Economic Community or the Economic Community of West African States. It will also provide a platform for addressing future challenges such as climate change, food security, energy and governance.
“Reaching common solutions requires political will, which the AU can help provide,” Léautier said.
For ACBF, the MOU with the AU goes beyond the here and now.
“There is a commitment at the African Union level to longer-term integration at the continentwide level,” Léautier said. “This may be the first time that young people feel that they can dream beyond the constraints of their borders, or of their societies or families. We are an example of that because we have 29 different African nationalities at the foundation. We are a microcosm of this change.”
Quest for new donors
Aside from marking the foundation’s 20th anniversary, 2011 will see the conclusion of ACBF’s current five-year strategic plan.
The plan secured more than $215 million, the bulk of which came from the World Bank. Other contributors include the United Nations Development Program, bilateral donors, the African Development Bank and African countries. The funding supports administrative expense, which amounts to $20 million each year, notably to sustain the foundation’s 85-member full-time staff. Officials say 80 percent of headquarter spending is directly attributed to supporting projects run by grant recipients across Africa. The foundation farms out about 20 percent of its internal workload to consultants, which, staffers say, is another means of building local capacity.
For the new strategic plan, Léautier and her colleagues have announced an ambitious goal: raising $300 million to $350 million for the 2012-2016 period. To get there, ACBF officials must convince existing and would-be donors that the oftentimes vague concept of capacity building is still relevant to the wider economic development and poverty reduction objectives. This is one challenge that Léautier is ready to face head on.
“What I find amazing about capacity building is that when you unbundle it to its core, it’s not rocket science,” she said. “Investing in capacity could transform the continent.”
Read more about Frannie Léautier’s views on how capacity building can bring Africa forward as well as on other issues such as aid effectiveness and the responsibilities of donors and aid recipients alike.
About the author
Lawrence Speer
Lawrence is a Paris-based correspondent and communications consultant who has been reporting and writing on development issues for more than 20 years. He covers French development assistance and has interviewed French Development Agency Director-General Dov Zerah for Devex News.
