By Andrew Kanyegirire

Midrand, 18/10/2010 - “We all need to take ownership of the broader NEPAD Agenda so that it is better understood and supported by Africans”, said Dr. Ibrahim Assane mayaki, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the NEPAD Planning and Coordinating Agency (NEPAD Agency) on Monday.

In an address to a network of visiting journalists from across Africa he said that despite the good intentions of many previous continental development initiatives, many of them had failed and that the onus is on all Africans to make NEPAD a success.

“We need to work with civil society organisations, the private sector, the youth, the media and all the key decision makers in order to get them to contribute to the successes of NEPAD,” he said.

He briefed the journalists on the set-up of the NEPAD Planning and Coordinating Agency (NEPAD Agency) as a technical body of the African Union to replace the NEPAD Secretariat. The establishment of the NEPAD Agency is a key outcome of the integration of NEPAD into the African Union structures and processes as per the decision of the 14th AU Assembly. “We have been mandated to implement facilitate and coordinate the implementation of regional and continental priority programmes and projects and to push for partnerships, resource mobilisation and research and knowledge management,” Mayaki said.

He said NEPAD was a vehicle for regional integration, and “it has to foster the implementation of regional development initiatives.” “We operate at the regional level and so the challenge has always been on how to translate our work to the national level,” he noted. It is for this reason that he called upon the media to take ownership of NEPAD and to continuously engage with the NEPAD Agency and the member states on the real impact of NEPAD. Speaking at the same engagement Prof. Richard Mkandawire, Head of Partnerships, Resource Mobilisation and Communications at the NEPAD Agency reminded the journalists that NEPAD was designed to address the current challenges facing the African continent and that it was a new vision for African development that was endorsed and formulated by the African leadership unlike the previous continental development initiatives.

The journalists were also presented with a series of briefings and examples of NEPAD’s successes in areas such as agriculture particularly through the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), infrastructure and regional integration within the context of unfolding work on the Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA) and also on the empowerment of women in Africa through the NEPAD Spanish Fund. Participating staff from the NEPAD Agency included Martin Bwalya (CAADP), Adama Deen (Infrastructure) and Justina Dugbazah and Romao Xavier (Gender).

The visiting journalists are part of a NEPAD/ Pan-African Parliament (PAP)/ German Technical Cooperation (GTZ) network of African media practitioners that are currently visiting various key pan-African institutions in South Africa – including regional media organisations. The ten journalists are from the following countries: Kenya, Sudan, Malawi, Ghana, and Algeria. Djibouti, Cameroon, Burundi, South Africa and Malawi.