2004/09/25
Social Watch Africa Regional Meeting in Tanzania
Social Watch
The Social Watch Africa Regional Meeting was held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania from September 22 to 24, 2005.
Africa Regional
Social Watch Meeting
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
22-24 September 2004
DRAFT
COMMUNIQUE
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Representatives of African civil society organisations active in the Social
Watch Coalition met for the first time in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania from 22 – 24
September 2004. The theme for the meeting was “Eradicating Poverty in Africa
for Social Development”. The meeting convened to explore strategies and
tactics for strengthening the Social Watch Africa coalition at national,
sub-regional and regional levels.
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Participants
focused on three sub-themes: Security and Development, the Millennium
Development Goals and the social development agenda, with special reference to
gender rights as expressed in the Beijing and Copenhagen conferences organised
by the UN in 1995.
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The main
conclusions of deliberation on these sub-themes are set out below.
Security &
Development
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African
Social Watchers understand “security” in involving more than just the absence
of armed conflict. Security involves the reasonable assurance of continued
access to basic social goods and services such as health, education, shelter,
nutrition, work, participation – in a word “development”. Properly understood
many “stable” African countries are actually experiencing deep security
crises.
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At the heart
of Africa’s security crises is the drive for appropriation of her resources
and her productivity by global corporate interests. Warfare has been imposed
on African countries principally as a method of acquiring strategic control
over resources and as a direct money making enterprise in its own right.
However, the extraction of Africa’s resources through unfair debt repayments,
unfair terms of trade with the North, increasing privatisation of her
economies and deregulation of FDI and related capital transfers (under SAPs
and PRSPs) are equally drivers of continental insecurity.
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The
increasing regionalisation of the assault on Africa’s security requires
greater regional coordination of Africa’s social movement. Social Watchers
undertake to:
a.
work within our own CSOs to improve our understanding of the nature of
security and development crises;
b.
challenge the anti-African propaganda of the corporate controlled media
that presents Africa’s security crises as the cause rather than the consequence
of underdevelopment and propagate information and promote understandings of
Africa’s security crises that empower African peoples in our quest for peace and
development;
c.
engage with national, sub regional, continental and global governance and
human rights institutions and strengthen their capacity to respond to Africa’s
security and human rights needs. Social Watchers must also pay keen attention to
institutions to its peoples and to the international community. In this regard,
the review of the workings of the UN Security Council presents and important
opportunity for addressing Africa’s security crises.
Millennium
Development Goals
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African
Social Watchers recognise in the MDGs campaign an opportunity to hold
governments (both southern and northern) accountable domestically and globally
for specific, quantifiable, albeit minimal, development commitments made at
the Millennium Summit. The campaign provides an opportunity for strengthening
global civil society activism and coordination. Activist CSOs can engage
governments over MDGs without compromising higher development aspirations or
more strategic domestic programmes. Activist groups must leverage on the MDGs
campaign to demand immediate and radical action on Africa’s crushing
development needs. Further engagement over the MDGs does not imply acceptance
of the neo-liberal development paradigm within which many governments,
supported by the IFIs, have sought to approach MDGs. Rather African CSOs have
a responsibility to contest this approach and to point out that the lack of
progress on MDGs demonstrates the weakness of neo-liberalism and the need for
alternative development paradigms that better reflect our Africa’s urgent
needs.
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African
Social Watchers commit to focusing national coalition energies on monitoring
government’s pursuit of the MDGs towards the 2005 Social Watch report. Each
national coalition must determine the particular millennium goals to watch and
report on.
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African
Social Watchers will also work towards delivering sub regional reports and
even a regional report for 2005.
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African
Social Watchers will adopt an activist posture and will commit to organising
around their reports.
The Social
Development Agenda
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Despite firm
commitments by African governments and tremendous efforts on the part of
gender activists across the continent, little concrete or sustainable progress
has been made towards gender equality. The legal, economic, health, education,
employment status of women remains far worse than that of men in Africa.
Governments have not demonstrated the political will to tackle specific gender
discrimination that has been identified by gender rights activists and other
section of society. Ritual references to the Beijing agenda have actually
become a means of limiting and bureaucratising gender rights campaigns and
legitimising other programmes such as PRSPs and NEPAD, which are often
injurious to the cause of gender equality. This in turn reflects the continued
exclusion of women from decision-making processes.
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Opportunities
do however exist for progress in achieving gender equality. The African social
movement is increasingly gender sensitive. There is growing global impatience
with African governments over this issue. Opportunities also exist in the
growing trend towards constitutional rule in Africa for gender activism.
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African
social watchers commit to raising domestic consciousness about the commitments
our governments have made within the framework of the United Nations and their
failure to meet these obligations and in mobilising to demand immediate action
on this front.
Organisation
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African
Social Watchers recognise that most national coalitions are weak, passive and
inconsistent in our practice. In most cases, the coalition is driven by a
single CSO or network that organises Social Watch as a peripheral activity.
Accordingly, interest and activity has tended to peak annually around the
launch of annual reports to the media and immediate lobbying of government and
international agencies. Between annual media launches, national coalitions
relapse into inactivity. Few national coalitions have managed to harness the
power of Social Watch reports as advocacy tools that can mobilise important
marginalised social constituencies for action in the way that social watchers
in other continents have managed to do. Linkages with the wider mass movement
and the media remain weak.
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African
Social Watchers recognise that these opportunities exist and will organise to
use them. Global and comparative information exposing the common features of
our development crises and the global character of campaigns is a powerful
tool for mobilisation. National level creativity regarding the means of
advocacy and mobilisation important opportunities for advocacy on the Social
Watch platform and to organise wide sections of youth, women.
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In the year
ahead African Social Watchers will work to bring Africa fully in to the world
Social Watch movement. We will:
a.
develop a calendar of strategic international events around which
governments can be called to account and adopt a graduated programme of mass
mobilisations towards the September 2005 UN review of the achievements of
Beijing and Copenhagen commitments in September 2005. Possible events to include
in this calendar include media conferences on the Dar es Salaam meeting, the
just ended World Summit on Hunger, the Scotland G8 meeting in July 2005, and the
WTO ministerial meeting in Hong Kong in December 2005 as well as AU and
sub-regional grouping events.
b.
establish regular e-mail contact between national campaigns, possible a
list serve and an electronic newsletter for African watchers as the first step
towards a continental report.
c.
work to hold an annual review meeting to strengthen continental
cooperation.
d.
begin to work in particular with Asia and Latin American Social Watch
coalitions to strengthen the third world perspective in the global Social Watch
coalition.
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