Originally founded by OECD member countries as “Club du Sahel” in 1976 to raise international support and awareness of the drought crisis in the Sahel region, the Club extended its geographic coverage in 2001 to encompass all 17 West African countries, home to approximately 290 million people.

Several Sahel and West African countries have seen prices of agricultural commodities rising since September 2007 compared with 2006 and on into the first quarter of 2008. This has given rise to tension in some countries like Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal.

Did you know that over the last ten years, the largest bilateral donors to Africa, excluding debt forgiveness, were the United States and France? The US has focused aid on Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan, whereas France’s main aid recipients have been Morocco, Mayotte and Senegal.

With the global economy mired in the fallout of subprime crises, costly oil and financial market volatility, it may seem a little surprising to learn that for the fourth consecutive year, Africa has experienced record economic growth. According to the 2008 edition of the African Economic Outlook (AEO) launched in May, the headlines are good indeed: 5.7% GDP growth and a per capita increase of 3.7% in 2007, with estimates looking quite bright for 2008 too. However, behind those numbers lies something more complex.

The gloomy image that has for so long hung over the world’s largest continent may at last be lifting.
Conflict and disease remain a bane, and there are challenges in areas like governance and transport, but as we reported in our last issue (No 255, May 2006), the OECD Development Centre’s latest African Economic Outlook is upbeat about future economic growth there.

Well done on a clever choice of photo for “Africa: An emerging markets frontier” (No 263, October 2007). Africa is certainly in a better state than it was and, as you point out, all that new investment coming from around the globe is encouraging. The test is how long it will all last.

You rightly point out that “the supply of medical staff reflects global movements of labour” (No 262, Databank, July 2007). But many of us might disagree with your upbeat headline: “Healthy immigration”. In a report published in 2005, the Royal African Society argues that while recruitment of African medical professionals has shored up western health services, it has left the health sector in sending countries facing permanent crisis or even complete collapse.

Something new is happening in Africa. Once talk of investment in the continent’s countries was dismissed as idealism. Now global investors are turning their eyes–and their funds–to a new investment frontier. Is this short-term euphoria?

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice shakes hands with OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría at the launch of a new multilateral initiative called the Partnership for Democratic Governance (PDG).The new initiative is designed to assist those developing countries that need help to improve governance, strengthen capacity and accountability, and deliver the services that are essential supports of effective government.

Egypt has become the first Arab and first African country to sign the OECD Declaration on International Investment and Multinational Enterprises. Egypt has made impressive progress in reforming its investment policies in recent years–foreign investment in manufacturing has been fully liberalised, for instance, with the exception of defence-related industries–but significant barriers to both foreign and domestic businesses remain.

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On 19 June 2007 South Africa became the first African country to join the OECD’s Anti-Bribery Convention. The still photo shows South Africa's ambassador to France, Nomasonto Maria Sibanda-Thusi, welcomed by OECD secretary-general, Angel Gurría.

The figures you give for the dramatic fall in support for economic infrastructure and agriculture as part of total bilateral ODA between 1995/96 to 2002/2003 are sobering (No. 261, May 2007). There is increased emphasis on these two areas by development agencies, but it will be important to see if resource commitments actually follow–particularly for aid and investments in agriculture. But didn’t NEPAD members at Maputo commit to invest 10% of GDP in agriculture, not to increase investments by 10%?

Letter to the editor: Secretary-General Angel Gurría argues that “advancing on the issue of water will help us move forward on almost all the Millennium Development Goals” (editorial, No. 256, July 2006). We agree, and would like to draw your attention to the Working for Water programme (WfW) in South Africa.

Will the Millennium Development Goals launched in 2000 be met by the agreed deadline of 2015? This question is at the top of discussions in government and development agencies around the world. There have been several initiatives to help focus minds and boost international progress towards meeting the goals, not least by the G8.

The latest African Economic Outlook from the OECD Development Centre, which looks at prospects for 29 countries, reports that economic activity overall in Africa rose by nearly 5% in 2005 amid windfall gains from booming markets in oil and minerals. The African Economic Outlook sees growth accelerating to 5.8% in 2006 and easing to 5.5% in 2007. These figures hide large differences between countries, particularly in light of endowments in natural resources.

Is it really “Africa’s moment” (No 249, May 2005)? You mention conflict, but how can we help stop humanitarian disasters, like the one that seems inevitable in Darfur, where we cannot say we were not warned. Essentially, some 2 million people (mostly elderly, female or infants), currently “sheltered” in sometimes abysmal refugee camps, now risk being shoved onto what effectively will become death marches into Chad by the very people who created the problem in the first place.

The recent history of the world’s second largest continent has been plagued by internal conflict, famine and disease. But recent economic prospects for Africa are looking more favourable than they have for a number of years.

Another resource which Africa is perhaps less noted for is oil. And it could become a serious source of finance for development in certain countries.

Investing in African agriculture would help poor people to help themselves. The World Bank forecasts that in Africa and the Middle East, the number of “absolute poor” will increase between now and 2015. Nearly 80% of these people live in rural areas. Their options to improve livelihoods are largely restricted to agriculture.

In September the United Nations convenes the first major summit to review implementation of the UN Millennium Development Goals, and to rally support for more progress to cut poverty and boost development in an effort to meet the 2015 deadline. Determined action, as well as some new ideas, may well be needed. One such idea is the Commission for Africa, launched by the UK prime minister Tony Blair in February 2004.

Does privatisation work for some of the world’s poorest countries? Privatisation in Sub-Saharan Africa: Where Do We Stand? looks at the last decade of privatisation in Africa and discusses its successes and failures in terms of public finance, economic efficiency, pricing and local markets.

South Africa has become the first nonmember country to join an OECD system for sharing results of safety tests on chemicals that saves governments and chemical producers some US$60 million a year.

African Economic Outlook: Regional conflicts, the global slowdown and the crisis in the Middle East are taking their toll on the African economy, even if there may be short-term gains: Cameroon and Ghana may be reaping the benefits of higher cocoa prices due to the civil war in Côte d’Ivoire.

“Africa is awakening to the realisation that its progress lies in partnership … we have got to be partners against all the evils emanating from the legacy of our history.” These were the concluding words of Mozambique’s president, Joaquim Chissano, who on 4 April became the second African head of state to recently visit the OECD. Mozambican President Chissano followed Senegal’s Abdoulayé Wade who in February 2002 came to participate in the launch of the Development Centre/African Development Bank’s first African Economic Outlook (see Book reviews).

The 2002/2003 edition of the joint African Development Bank/OECD Development Centre African Economic Outlook (AEO) was launched at OECD Headquarters in Paris on 3 March in unusually dramatic circumstances. The launch was initially planned for the fourth International Forum on African Perspectives which should have been held by the two institutions on 3-4 March in the premises of the French Ministry of Economy, Finance and Industry.

Thérèse Pujolle has been named president of the Sahel and West Africa Club, succeeding Joan Boer. Ms Pujolle was previously Deputy Director of the Centre of Prospective Analysis at the French foreign ministry and has extensive knowledge of the development sector, as well as that of Central and Sub-Saharan Africa where she has held various positions with wide-ranging responsibilities.

Ministers from Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa were guests of honour at the OECD ministerial council in Paris on 16 May, 2002 when they met to discuss financing development in general and ways forward for OECD – NEPAD co-operation in particular. All agreed that NEPAD was a promising initiative that had to be advanced. Several areas were considered, including:

The agenda at Johannesburg will be wide and the issues interconnected, but one thing is clear: food security in developing countries must be a cornerstone of any notion of sustainable development. Mr Arnold offers a course of action.

Economic development cannot occur in isolation. This has been the mantra of the European community for the past 50 years, the force behind the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and a call to action for East Asia. But although Africa has a long track record in regional integration initiatives, the results have been by and large rather disappointing.

There can be no doubt that poverty, which was the scourge of the 20th century, continues to confront us as the pre-eminent challenge of the new century. High mortality rates claim the lives of millions of women and children. This scourge is manifested in the form of diseases, malnutrition, stunted physical and intellectual development, all of which result in grim consequences. One overriding factor is to blame: poverty.

“What we have to fight against is a company judging the whole of Africa by what is happening in a single country,” OECD Development Centre president, Jorge Braga de Macedo, told a news conference after the third International Forum on African Perspectives at the OECD in Paris in early February. Senegal’s president, Abdoulaye Wade, the first African president to take part in a meeting at the OECD, urged investors at the meeting to take a new – and more informed – look at Africa. President Wade said that it was time for “a new approach, a regional approach” but one that recognised African countries are changing.

The Club du Sahel was formed 1976. It is an active forum that brings together the Sahelian states belonging to the Permanent Inter-State Committee for the Prevention of Drought in the Sahel (CILSS) - Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Chad, the Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Senegal - non-government organisations representing the private sector, rural communities and women, municipal officials, and the main bilateral and multilateral donors. The Club is run by a secretariat based at OECD in Paris.

Africa is the poorest of the earth’s continents and the Sahel is the world’s poorest region at peace. Six of the nine countries that make up this West African region – the Gambia, Chad, Guinea Bissau, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger – are among the bottom twelve on a list of 174 countries ranked in the latest UNDP report on human development. Adding to the crushing poverty is an unstable climate, fragile natural resources, dependence on a small number of exports that are subject to highly unpredictable market fluctuations, and a heavy reliance on financial transfers from abroad. All these factors generate an environment of permanent uncertainty that is hardly conducive to investment.