After an impressive acceleration in growth and poverty reduction since the mid-1990s, many African countries continue to register robust growth in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Will this growth persist, given the tepid recovery in developed countries, numerous weather shocks, and civil conflicts in Africa? This paper "stress tests" African economies. The findings indicate that Africa's long-term growth is fairly impervious to a prolonged recession in high-income countries. Growth is, however, much more sensitive to a disruption of capital flows to the region, and to internal shocks, such as civil conflict and drought, even if the latter follow historical patterns. The broad policy implication is that with proper domestic production conditions African countries can sustain robust long-term growth. Because of the economic dominance of the agriculture sector and the share of food in household budgets, countries will need to increase the resilience of agriculture and protect it from unfavorable climate change impacts, to prevent food insecurity.
Health equity in economic and trade policies
This collection of papers reviews select issues on the regional integration agenda in east and southern Africa. It starts by assessing the African Paradigm of Regional Integration, as well as the broader AU integration agenda. It also reflects on the impact of the global economic crisis on Africa. This is followed by a review of progress on regional integration in the Southern African Development Community (SADC). It then considers country-specific issues, including the trade policy choices of several countries, the role of new generation trade issues, such as services on the regional integration agenda, and assesses the status of protectionism, trade remedies and safeguards in regional trade agreements, both intra- and extra-regional. Finally, it presents a review of the developments in the negotiations concerning SADC’s economic partnership agreements, specifically focusing on concerns raised within the SADC group.
Due to a number of bottlenecks, the generic pharmaceutical manufacturers in the East African Community region produce at a cost disadvantage compared to their large-scale Asian counterparts. This article highlights some of the key areas where civil society has engaged and can still engage with local pharmaceutical industries to address these challenges. While the local manufacturing sector can play an important role in increasing access to and promoting the affordability of medicines in the region, a lot of support is needed for them to not only increase their production capacity but also to make a greater contribution to health care in the EAC region. the author argues that health civil society now needs to get into wider campaigns for the development of regulatory guidelines stating requirements for manufacturers of generic medicines to develop local capacity and undertake increased technology transfer into the region while at the same time lobbying EAC partner states to create subsidies and concessions that can boost the local pharmaceutical manufacturers’ capacity to adequately provide the much needed legitimate, affordable and quality medicines.
Natural resource governance activists have called on African leaders and corporates to stop the systematic looting of resources because it deprives the states of meaningful revenue needed for development. The call was made at a regional conference on the political economy of resource looting in the SADC region organized by Centre for Natural Resource Governance (CNRG) Southern Africa Political Economy Series (SAPES Trust) and regional watchdog Southern African Resource Watch (SARW) in Harare in May 2019. Southern Africa is said to be losing tens of billions of American dollars in potential natural resources revenue through systematic looting which includes trade mispricing, tax avoidance, corruption and transnational organized crime involving ruling elites and foreign actors, regional natural resource experts have said. SADC delegates present at the conference suggested that there is need to harmonise the laws in the region and adopt mineral resource governance and stronger contract negotiations to curb the leakages.
According to this press release by the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), a South African coalition of HIV and AIDS treatment activists, South Africa currently provides patent protection beyond what is required by the international TRIPS agreement, which regulates patents, including those governing production of medicines. Flexibilities in TRIPS allow developing countries to produce or procure affordable generics and countries like India, Brazil and Thailand have used these flexibilities to curb excessive patenting of pharmaceuticals and promote public health. Yet South Africa has not followed their example, argues TAC, having granted 2,442 pharmaceutical patents in 2008 alone, while Brazil only granted 278 pharmaceutical patents between 2003 and 2008. Although President Jacob Zuma has signed on to a joint declaration with India and Brazil recognising the urgent need to scale up production of generic medicines by using TRIPS flexibilities, TAC argues that government has not yet taken the concrete steps needed to fulfill this commitment.
This study aimed to assess developments over the last 5 years in providing compensation, quantify shortfalls and explore underlying challenges for ex mineworkers and their families. Using the database with compensable disease claims from over 200,000 miners, the medical assessment database of 400,000 health records and the employment database with 1.6 million miners, rates of claims, unpaid claims and shortfall in claim filing were calculated for each of the southern African countries with at least 25,000 miners who worked in South African mines, by disease type and gender. Interviews were also conducted in Johannesburg, Eastern Cape, Lesotho and a local service unit near a mine site, supplemented by document review and auto-reflection, adopting the lens of a critical rights-based approach. A myriad of diverse systemic barriers persist, especially for workers and their families outside South Africa. Calculating predicted burden of occupational lung disease compared to compensable claims paid suggests a major shortfall in filing claims in addition to the large burden of still unpaid claims. Despite progress made, our analysis reveals ongoing complex barriers and illustrates that the considerable underfunding of the systems required for sustained prevention and social protection (including compensation) needs urgent attention. With class action suits in the process of settlement, the globalized mining sector is now beginning to be held accountable.
Negotiations to expand the availability of medicines under a World Trade Organisation agreement on intellectual property rights by 31 March broke down after informal consultations showed no compromise forthcoming, according to diplomatic sources in Geneva. At issue is an amendment of the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) to allow countries producing generic pharmaceuticals under compulsory license to export those products to other countries in need.
Tanzanian Members of Parliament have expressed disappointment with the influx of substandard and low quality foodstuffs into the country. This brief article voices concern for consequent adverse health outcomes. Sources said that some of the "dumped" foodstuffs were harmful to human life.
According to the author of this article, secrecy jurisdictions – or tax havens - act as financial sinkholes: places where vast sums of money flow between the legitimate world economy and the illicit underworld economy. The costs of financial sinkholes are borne by ordinary citizens throughout the world, not only by taxpayers in industrialised countries but also by many of the world’s poorest people. The author points to the flight of US$735 billion (in constant 2008 dollars) from sub-Saharan Africa from 1970 to 2008. Most of this disappeared into secrecy jurisdictions, with recorded African deposits in Western banks amounting to less than 6% of this amount. To put Africa’s capital haemorrhage into perspective, the total foreign debt of the same countries stood at US$177 billion at the end of 2008. In this sense Africa is a net creditor to the rest of the world because its external assets far exceed its external liabilities. However the assets are private and hidden, whereas the liabilities are public, owed by the people of Africa through their governments. The author points to advocacy from groups like the Tax Justice Network, Global Financial Integrity and Global Witness, who have raised public awareness of these issues.
The World Health Organization has released a long-awaited list of high-level experts tasked with finding innovative funding mechanisms for needed medical research on neglected diseases. The list largely contains governmental and intergovernmental representatives, and first reactions to it have been generally positive. The creation of this ‘results-oriented and time-limited’ expert group was a key outcome of the WHO’s global strategy and plan of action on public health, innovation and intellectual property, approved at World Health Assembly in May. The 24-member body will look at the current financing and coordination of research and development, as well as proposals for new and innovative sources of funding to stimulate research and development in diseases which disproportionately effect developing countries.