THE AFRICAN AGENDA TOWARDS EARTH SUMMIT
PANAFRICAN CONFERENCE

Conference in Nairobi, Kenya
January 8th - 12th, 2002
Organised by the Kenyan NGO Earth Summit Forum

The conference seeked to strategically identify NGO processes all over Africa and to gain consensus among civil society on what issues Africa as a continent should focus on in the run up to the WSSD. The conference intended to develop common African grounds that would feed into an African civil society agenda for the upcoming WSSD. The outcome of the conference would be a common African strategy to promote this agenda in the official preparations for the summit and during the summit itself.

Participants from all over Africa attended the conference, all of them involved in national and subregional preparatory processes that have been unfolded throughout the continent, some of them with support from the Heinrich Boell Foundation or institutions like the Danish 92 Group. The subregional processes were presented at the conference, showing a wide variety of issues and concerns. As the representatives from all African subregions pointed out, poverty is still the major hurdle towards sustainable development and as such directly affects environmental degradation. Implementation of Agenda 21 was not successful all over Africa, and the commitments made by developed countries (e.g. to reserve 0.7% of their GDP for development aid) were not met, adding to evident problems within the continent such as corruption, bad governance and the increasing gap between rich and poor people within African societies. Apart from poverty, social issues such as gender equality and health were seen as main topics for an African agenda towards sustainable development, as well as environmental issues such as freshwater, desertification and climate change.

The overall aim, to produce an African Civil Society position for the WSSD, had proven to be very difficult to facilitate due to the wide variety of topics and different foci of groups represented at the conference. An African Civil Society Steering Committee was elected to continue working on such an African position that will be finalised via the existing communication networks. A draft declaration will be out soon -- to be used as the African position at the upcoming meetings and conferences in the run up to the WSSD.