The African Development Bank’s has highlighted five key priorities that seek to plug the continent’s infrastructure gap and catalyze development projects that will lift the future generation out of poverty.
In the development evaluation week, that is scheduled to end on Wednesday, ADB is focused on achieving greater development impact through learning from the past.
Priorities include, Light Up and Power Africa, Feed Africa, Integrate Africa, Industrialize Africa, and improve the quality of life for the people of Africa- complement Africa’s ambitious 2063 targets.
Remarking in in Abidjan, Ivory coast, President for ADB, Akinwumi Adesina noted that most of the African countries on the path to transformation, struggle with the ability to develop measurable outcomes, indicators and objectives that remain relevant and efficient however the capacity to successfully drive the transformation, will be effective monitoring and evaluation tools that will give governments an opportunity to learn from successes and failures.
“Learning constructively from past successes, the Bank considers mistakes and experiences critical building blocks and tools for promoting accountability in development work, and a key to more powerful development impact,” Vice President Pierre Guislain said in welcoming remarks made on behalf of Bank President, Akinwumi Adesina, at the opening session.
DEV evaluations and knowledge activities are critical to informing the strategic direction required for delivering high impact results on the Bank’s Highlights. They provide evidence-based knowledge upon which decision makers and implementers can base policies, strategies and frameworks for charting their course towards achievement of economic and social prosperity for all.
“The Bank’s strength is that it can assist countries to create a conducive framework for evaluation,” said South African Minister for Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma.
She said there is need for a collaborative effort of evaluators and implementers to achieve Agenda 2063, “Africa has the capacity; we will and must succeed to reach the Africa we want,” she added.
As IDEV focuses on some of the most urgent issues in Africa’s development agenda such as infrastructure development and agricultural value chains in achieving inclusion. It will be asking what the lessons learned from its evaluations are, especially in those sectors critical to eradicating poverty.