Private sector in East Africa ready to discard the old development model

Chief Executive Officers, Central Bank Governors and financial experts, last week, met in Arusha, Tanzania to seek solutions to the surging global financial crisis.

The meeting, the first of its kind in the region, uncovered the growing need for developing countries to seek home-grown solutions to local problems.

Developing nations have always been quick to take as gospel truth the prescriptions of international aid agencies with little regard for domestic solutions.

This perhaps partly explains why the development model espoused by the supposed development experts and international aid has failed to lift Sub Saharan Africa out of the poverty trap.

After years of pumping huge sums of money in development aid, the region is yet to record growth at household level that donors envisage.

While some policies such as liberalization have opened up African markets and in the process created competition, many more have failed that donors are now re-thinking their development model in favour of more home-grown solutions.

The historical gathering of finance ministers, central bank governors, and chief executive officers of leading East African companies shows that indeed the region has developed local capacity to come up with solutions to problems afflicting them.

The meeting convened under the auspices of East African Business Council was notable for absence of rhetoric, and complaints that characterize such gatherings. It was more of a “lets get down to work” as shown in the final draft communiqué issued at the end of the meeting.

The communiqué, whose recommendations will feed into national and regional negotiations and partly inform the private sector requests ahead of the June budgets, is a tool kit for both the private sector and regional governments in dealing with the current global financial crisis.

The meeting also showed that when brought together the private sector can drive the Integration process in East Africa quite faster than the bureaucracy and selfish interests that seem to characterize government negotiations.

But, more importantly the private sector in East Africa, for the first time, came together to seek solutions to a problem that would ordinarily be perceived to be beyond their comprehension.

It was a bold testament to International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other donor agencies that the private sector in the region has developed the capacity to stare crisis in face and come up with local solutions.

In the face of the current global financial crisis, it was indeed time to get down to work.