Africa Needs a Paradigm Shift to End Poverty

Goats are an important source of income for drylands communities. But there is little investment going there © Stafford Ondego

“Why must we take immediate action in the drylands of Africa? Because it will pay off and yield great results with multiple co-benefits. With nearly 400 million Africans living in arid and semi-arid lands today and with the drylands occupying 65% of the continent’s landmass, there is, here, a message of urgency. Unless Africa’s policy and decision makers as well as land users adopt a paradigm shift from their traditional perception of drylands as marginal and, sometimes, waste lands, and resolutely and consistently invest in transforming them into breadbaskets, progress in attaining the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will remain problematic.”

This was the message of Executive Secretary Luc Gnacadja in his keynote address to a high-level gathering of Africa’s policy makers; ministers, lawmakers and experts. Gnacadja was speaking at the one-day consultation forum titled, ‘New Sustainable Drylands Initiative and Partnership between COMESA and the MDG Center’, held on 13 January 2010 at the World Agroforestry Center in Nairobi, Kenya.

He stressed that “Africa’s drylands are not a liability, but rather an asset for global sustainability. Their reclamation will impact many of the global challenges today. Food security, climate change adaptation and mitigation, renewable energy, poverty alleviation or peace and security in particular. The successes recorded so far,” he said, “must be scaled up and scaled out, and knowledge shared to respond to this immediate imperative."

In a rhetorical remark, Gnacadja posed "So, why has action been so timid and limited towards investing in the drylands? Because governments and their development partners don’t really know the cost of their inaction. They don’t really know the socio-economic potentials and contributions of the drylands. Governments don’t really know how much their drylands could weigh in on their macro-economic balance sheet, if well taken care of. We need to further assist them in that regard by improving our assessment and monitoring tools."

He specified that the main challenge lies in the drylands, as all indicators point towards the impoverished regions of Africa as the laggards in the attainment of MDGs, adding that the imperative is to invest massively in Africa’s dry and degraded lands in order to empower the affected populations and restore their ecosystems.

The MDG Center was established in 2006 by the United Nations (UN) Millennium Center and Columbia University’s Earth Institute headed by Professor Jeffrey Sachs, also UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s Special Advisor on the MDGs. COMESA is a regional cooperation mechanism that promotes free trade among its member states. The full statement of Executive Secretary Gnacadja is available here.

The accompanying power point presentation is available here.