The Africa Policy Information Center (APIC) is providing an extremely useful service by bringing together these three important documents within the covers of a single publication. Taken together the three documents open a window on African views of the root causes of Africa's problems, and more importantly, the keys to solving them. They speak with one voice about the central role of African people in efforts to achieve much-needed political, social and economic change on the continent. Yet each of these documents also makes its own distinctive contribution to development thinking about Africa, complementing and supporting the perspectives of the other two. Each has a somewhat different primary focus -- on structural adjustment, or popular participation, or security.The unique contribution of the African Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment Programmes (AAF-SAP) is its challenge to traditional thinking about structural adjustment as expressed by multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. During the 1980s, multilateral institutions and Northern donor governments pressured increasing numbers of African governments to adopt economic austerity -- or structural adjustment -- programs that emphasized cutting government spending and balancing exports and imports. The conventional wisdom was that such economic belt-tightening measures, though bitter medicine, were essential to economic progress.
AAF-SAP challenged that view, pointing out instead that traditional structural adjustment measures -- such as promotion of export crops -- tend to perpetuate and exacerbate Africa's underlying development problems. It called for linking adjustment to a process of long-term structural change in which human improvement would be the central goal. Its message: "No program of adjustment or development makes sense if it makes people indefinitely more miserable." Three years after its release, AAF-SAP is still the best articulated challenge to traditional structural adjustment programs on record.
The African Charter for Popular Participation in Development and Transformation had a very different genesis from the AAF-SAP, though the process which generated it also had strong support from the Economic Commission for Africa. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) played a central role in events leading up to the drafting of the Charter. The conference that produced the Charter was proposed by NGOs and jointly planned by NGOs and United Nations agencies. NGOs -- including grass-roots groups -- participated in the conference on an equal basis with UN agencies and African governments. The Charter itself was drafted by a committee of NGOs, UN agencies, and African government representatives.
Of the three documents, the Charter is the closest to being a document of the African people. Not surprisingly, it diagnoses the root causes of Africa's problems as the failure to put people at the center of development. It calls upon various actors -- governments, UN agencies, Northern NGOs, African NGOs, and the people themselves -- to take specific steps to promote popular participation. It includes a definition of popular participation increasingly quoted in other UN documents, by NGOs themselves, and by governments: "Popular participation is, in essence, the empowerment of the people to effectively involve themselves in creating the structures and in designing policies and programs that serve the interests of all." The African Charter is a landmark document: an expression of the will of the African people at a moment in history when throughout the continent "the people" are increasingly demanding a larger role in the important decisions affecting their lives.
The Kampala Document, Towards a Conference on Security, Stability, Development and Cooperation in Africa, in contrast, is a statement of African leaders, including former and current heads of state, that offers an African perspective on security and governance issues. It defines security broadly, linking security to development and regional cooperation. It wears proudly its African origins by grouping its key principles under four "calabashes": security, stability, development and cooperation.
The unique contribution of the Kampala Document is the way in which it relates security and stability to the pursuit of people-centered development. It defines security not simply in military terms, but rather in terms of the ability of the individual citizen to live in peace, have access to basic necessities, and participate freely in governance. The document contains numerous references to popular participation, including a reference to the Charter on Popular Participation. It goes farther than earlier statements of African leaders toward endorsing a cooperative approach to Africa's problems of instability and political repression by laying out basic ground rules for good governance and proposing continental mediation and peacekeeping mechanisms.
Unquestionably, the primary importance of these three documents is that they are a broad-based and internally consistent expression of African perspectives on vital policy issues affecting Africans. I believe their importance extends even further, however -- well beyond Africa. If we are willing to listen, these voices from the African continent could also help those of us who live outside Africa re-orient our thinking toward more creative, people-centered solutions to the development problems of our own societies.
Carol Capps
Church World Service/Lutheran World Relief Office on Development Policy
June 1992