NEPADS Resource Mobilization Strategy: the Gender Dimensions

Abstract

The New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) is the most current in a long series of blueprints and policy frameworks aimed at laying the foundation for a viable path for Africa's socio- economic development. Hailed as the Marshal Plan for Africa, NEPAD purports to do what its predecessors such as the Lagos Plan of Action (1980), the African Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment Program for Socio Economic Recovery and . Transformation (1989) and the African Charter for Popular Participation for Development (1990) failed to do. At the international level, NEPAD has generally been embraced as a good model for international cooperation and implementation of economic and political reforms in Africa along a nee-liberal path closely linking the restoration of good governance to development. On the African continent, NEPAD has received n\ixed reception, with the state managers fully endorsing it and even rapidly moving towards its implementation. Some non-state civil society sectors on the other hand, have reacted with a sense of anger and feeling of betrayal by their governments for literally ambushing and presenting them with a ready made document prepared without their participation and input, despite its claim to being designed and owned by African people. Radical African intellectuals and civil societies have however critiqued not only the process but also the content ofNEPAD, which many view as inadequate and with a heavy nee-liberal ideology, which has already spelled disaster for Africa, in the form of Gender dimensions of NEPAD / 47