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The Origins

The Southern African Development Co-ordination Conference, SADCC, the forerunner of SADC, the Community, was established in April 1980 by Governments of the nine Southern African countries of Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The formation of SADCC was the culmination of a long process of consultations by the leaders of Southern Africa. Towards the end of the 1970's, it became clear to the leaders of the region that just having a national flag and a national anthem would not meet the needs of the people for improved living standards.

Secondly, the positive experiences gained in working together in the group of Frontline States, to advance the political struggle, had to be translated into broader co-operation in pursuit of economic and social development.

From 1977, active consultations were undertaken by representatives of the Frontline States, culminating in a meeting of Foreign Ministries of the Frontline States in Gaborone, in May 1979, which called for a meeting of ministers responsible for economic development.

That meeting was subsequently convened in Arusha, Tanzania, in July 1979. The Arusha meeting led to the birth to the Southern African Development Co-ordination Conference a year later.

The SADCC or the conference, was formed with four principal objectives, namely:

• to reduce Member States dependence, particularly, but not only, on apartheid South Africa;
• to implement programmes and projects with national and regional impact;
• to mobilise Member States' resources, in the quest for collective self-reliance; and
• to secure international understanding and support.

These objectives were pursued with determination and vigour. Through SADCC, the founding fathers sought first to demonstrate the tangible benefits of working together, and to cultivate a climate of confidence and trust among member States.

SADC has developed since then, to become a organisation that has a Programme of Action, covering several broad economic and social sectors, namely, Energy, Tourism, Environment and Land Management, Water, Mining, Employment and Labour, Culture, Information and Sport and Transport and Communications.

Other sectors are Finance and Investment, Human Resource Development, Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources, Legal Affairs and Health. Sectors are each co-ordinated by a Member State with some member states co-ordinating more than one sector.

Over the past two years SADC has undertaken an exercise to restructure its institutions and a report on this was adopted by an Extra-Ordinary Summit on March 9, 2001 in Windhoek, Namibia. This restructuring was necessitated by the number of difficulties and constraints encountered in the process of moving the organisation from a coordinating conference into a Community. These include:

• Inadequate institutional reforms to enable the effective transformation from SADCC (Coordinating Conference) to SADC (the Community). Furthermore, the resource provision and the management system were not adequately addressed.
• The need to put in place appropriate mechanisms capable of translating the high degree of political commitment to shape the scope and scale of community building through regional integration. This implies delegating authority and strengthening the capacity for decision-making to the relevant agencies responsible for implementing the SADC agenda.
• Lack of synergy between the objectives and strategies of the Treaty on one hand and the existing SADC Programme of Action (SPA) and the institutional framework on the other.
• Limited capacity to mobilise significant levels of the region's own resources for the implementation of its Programme.
• The external financial overdependence of the SADC Programme of Action (SPA) to the tune of more than 80 percent, which compromises the Programme's sustainability.

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