19. South Africa in Global Development Fora: Cooperation and Contestation

South Africa has always been unequivocal in stating that the “United Nations remains the most inclusive and transparent means to advance development cooperation”. South Africa considers ECOSOC (United Nations Economic and Social Council) the “principal body for coordination, policy review, policy dialogue and recommendations on economic and social development […]” (IGD 2013, p. 8). At the UN, South Africa’s actions reflect its view that the UN requires reforms to ensure that developing countries have more say, but it does not question its legitimacy as the apex global governance body. In that sense, it is involved in regime- or institution-shifting with regard to the UN.

South Africa’s major entry into the UN global sustainable development arena was its hosting of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in 2002. It was a high-water mark for the country’s diplomacy.² An important outcome of the WSSD was the integration of the three pillars of sustainable development (social, economic, and environmental), with the country arguing strongly that poverty eradication needed to be at the heart of sustainable development (Mashabane 2018, p. 404; Schroeder 2002, p. 34).

South Africa’s role on development matters in the UN has been projected often through its holding of various positions, most notably as chair of the G77 + China (2006 and 2015). In 2006, as chair of the G77 + China, South Africa “forcefully challenged” US efforts to water down the development proposals in the World Summit Outcome Document, while a decade later it played a constructive role in ensuring the 2030 Agenda was adopted by consensus (Mashabane 2018, p. 405). In a book on the inside story of the negotiations of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the authors note that “the chair of the G77 is perhaps the second most important multilateral post after the President of the UN General Assembly” because members in the UNGA usually look to the G77 to draft initial resolutions (Kamau et al. 2018, p. 10).

Earlier, in January 2013, the UNGA president appointed South Africa and Ireland to coordinate preparations for the Special Event scheduled for September 2013 to follow up on efforts made towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which had been agreed at the UNGA High Level Plenary Meeting on the MDGs in 2010.

South Africa has been elected twice to serve as a member of the UN’s ECOSOC (2004–2006 and 2013–2015). With regard to its latter term on ECOSOC, South Africa saw the period leading up to the post-2015 agenda as a crucial one and regarded ECOSOC’s role in coordinating the various processes as key (IGD 2013, p. 8). South Africa has always advocated for the strengthening and further reform of ECOSOC so that it is better placed to tackle global challenges and the needs of developing countries (IGD 2013, p. 8).

South Africa was a strong proponent of the MDGs and what the Millennium Summit and Declaration promised, seeing it as carrying the potential to create a better life for all. President Thabo Mbeki said at the time: “The fundamental challenge that faces this Millennium Summit is that, credibly, we must demonstrate the will to end poverty and underdevelopment” (cited in Zondi 2017, p. 129). South Africa also championed the development of African capacity to generate its own data to monitor the MDGs. Nevertheless, a deficit in data to inform policy and track the SDGs continues to be a challenge for many African states in the post-2015 landscape.

Although South Africa worked constructively on the adoption of the SDGs, it has also argued strongly that the work of the MDGs still needs to be completed. The new set of goals and indicators should not supersede the MDG targets where these remain unfulfilled. Together with the other African countries, South Africa advocated that the “unfinished business” of the MDGs needs to be completed. At the 2013 UNGA, President Zuma set out South Africa’s key concerns for both the content and the rules of a post-2015 agenda. These included the need to fully implement the MDGs and that this should remain a priority in the post-2015 landscape. He again emphasised that all three dimensions of sustainable development should be integrated: “eradication of poverty through economic development, social development and environmental sustainability” (Zuma 2013, para. 18). In addition, South Africa supported the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities between developed and developing economies. Zuma argued this in the context of what he explained as the “tendency to attempt to delegate some of these historical responsibilities to new emerging economies in the South”. He said this was “unacceptable and unworkable as such emerging nations have their own historical challenges and backlogs to deal with” (Zuma 2013, para. 27).

South Africa was the co-facilitator of the UN Financing for Development Forum (FfD) in 2017 together with Belgium. The first forum in 2016 had produced a procedural text that had not covered all the chapters of the Addis Ababa Action Agenda (AAAA). When South Africa took over the co-facilitation together with Belgium, they aimed to get agreement on a substantive text in the UN Inter-Agency Task Force on Financing for Development (IATF) on financing for development that focused on a balanced approach to all chapters in the AAAA. South Africa believed that, if the forum was to advance development, the follow-up meetings could not only focus on certain elements but ignore others. Furthermore, South Africa’s position in the negotiations was that this forum should not focus only on official development assistance (ODA) commitments— FfD was not about measurement but about financing. South Africa also stood firm against efforts by some countries to push the Busan principles into the document. The discussion on trade was also difficult. There had been a number of commitments in the AAAA, including those on strengthening the multilateral trading system, facilitating international trade, and promoting trade policy coherence. The IATF report was not able to significantly take these issues forward; rather, it resorted to the language that had been used in the AAAA. Overall, during its co-facilitation, South Africa was keen on strengthening the IATF report so that it provided concrete recommendations to member states to speed up implementation.

In advancing its cause of a greater voice for Africa and more inclusive global governance, South Africa has made use of a number of instruments—from hosting major global events to chairing groupings within the UN, and helping to shape the agendas.

For many countries in the South, the OECD is considered a rich man’s club that has tried to assimilate emerging economies into its structures and encourage them to adopt rules and norms developed previously by its members. This outreach has been partially successful over the years, with a few developing economies joining its membership. The first of these was Mexico, but more recently, it has been followed by South Korea and Chile, with Costa Rica and Colombia on the candidate list for accession.

South Africa has been part of the OECD’s enhanced engagement, or outreach, which includes four other emerging economies—China, India, Indonesia, and Brazil—and which began in 2007. Much of this engagement relates to domestic issues, such as macroeconomic policies and structural reforms; however, South Africa has worked with the OECD on its regional initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa, including as vice co-chair of the NEPAD-OECD African Investment Initiative. It is also active in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Regional Investment Policy Framework and the OECD–African Development Bank Group initiative to support business integrity and anti-bribery efforts in Africa. South Africa is also an associate of the BEPS (base erosion and profit-shifting) project.

Yet, although South Africa recognises the technical value of its various engagements with the OECD, it has chosen not to join it. The developing countries that have joined it see their admission to the group as a mark of their developmental success.³ South Africa and other developing countries, such as India, consider the OECD—and especially its Development Assistance Committee (DAC)—as a bastion of Western-created rules that should not be foisted upon developing countries, especially in relation to monitoring, measuring, and evaluating their SSC (Sidiropoulos 2012, p. 236).

In addition, the OECD’s role in global economic governance has grown over the years, especially in its interaction and engagement with the G20, which often looks to it for technical support. Because the G20 does not have a formal Secretariat, the OECD partly fills that role in practice, positioning itself as a global policy network with wide-ranging expertise. Although this has proved extremely useful to G20 and other processes, a number of South African officials in the past have raised concerns that the absence of well-resourced institutions from the Global South means that policy advice and input into the G20 process is still shaped by Northern-dominated organisations, notwithstanding the fact that the G20—with its more diverse membership—should differentiate itself from the traditional orthodox global policy prescriptions.

Thus, South Africa objects to the dominance of a Northern-constructed and dominated organisation exercising a significant role both in the evolution of global public goods and in the development cooperation field.

South Africa is an emerging donor, but it does not report on its development cooperation to the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee. Historically, after 1994, South Africa played an important role in the OECD-DAC meetings—and specifically the HLFs, starting with Rome and culminating in Busan in 2011—as a recipient.

In its dual role of being both a donor and a recipient, however, it has adopted an approach at the political level emphasising that the metrics created by the traditional aid donors to monitor and evaluate their development cooperation cannot be applied to SSC. South Africa argues that much of SSC is not financial, but technical, in-kind, or a contribution to global public goods (e.g. peace-building) (Klingebiel 2018; Lalbahadur and Rawhani 2017). The DAC system does not provide for the tracking and evaluation of that kind of cooperation through its focus on monetisation.

In 2015, the OECD spearheaded a process to develop a universal standard to track contributions to the SDGs—the Total Official Support for Sustainable Development (TOSSD). A number of developing countries opposed the OECD’s engaging in this process. At a political level, the South Africa government prefers the UN’s Inter-agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators, and indeed at the UN in New York, TOSSD is perceived as a product of the DAC.⁴ There is concern that TOSSD is another way of camouflaging ODA and reducing it overall.

In the OECD-DAC, South Africa in the early 2000s was instrumental in coordinating a more harmonised African voice in the HLFs that began with Rome in 2003 and ended with Busan in 2011.

Informal clubs are by their nature exclusive in terms of their input legitimacy, but they are increasingly being seen and used by countries as instruments of regime- or institution-shifting or regime- or institution-creating. When the G20 transformed into a leaders’ summit at the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008, it was considered more inclusive than the G8 and thus better able to navigate the global challenges and develop new rules of engagement. Very soon afterwards, in 2010, the G20 established a Development Working Group, and South Africa has served as its co-chair since then. Both in that forum and in other G20 working groups, South Africa has lobbied for African concerns and for solutions to global challenges that also reflect Southern perspectives (Cooper 2013; Sidiropoulos 2019). Its above-mentioned concern about the inordinate influence on policy of the OECD in the G20 is one such example. South Africa has been a proponent of better coordination among the emerging market economies in the G20, recognising that the G7 operates as a much more effective caucus within the G20 because it already has established mechanisms and practices of coordination.

South Africa has strongly campaigned for the G20 to combat illicit financial flows (IFFs). In the DWG, South Africa was instrumental in pushing for the World Customs Organization to prepare a report on IFFs channelled via trade misinvoicing. By introducing it in the DWG, South Africa wanted to ensure that the development dimension would not be lost. South Africa has been particularly successful in drawing attention to the impact of IFFs on developing countries, particularly on African economies and development. South Africa was also active in the debates to tackle BEPS in the G20 and worked with the OECD in this regard.

Other issues that South Africa has keenly participated in, in the G20, are infrastructure and its asset class potential—an objective that NEPAD had also highlighted as important. The finance track has also been working on a set of G20 Principles for the Infrastructure Project Preparation Phase. These are intended to help “deliver a pipeline of well-prepared and bankable projects that are attractive to private investors by improving assessments of project rationale, options appraisal, commercial viability, long-term affordability, and deliverability” (Ministry of Finance Japan 2018, para. 4). For South Africa, project preparation in infrastructure is a neglected area. Another area that is relevant to Africa and development in the finance track is financial inclusion. This has also been part of the DWG mandate. South Africa is a co-chair of the subgroup on financial inclusion data and measurement⁵ of the Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion, which was launched in December 2010 after the G20 Seoul Summit, where financial inclusion featured prominently in the Seoul Development Consensus. South Africa has also urged the International Monetary Fund to create a facility that meets the specific needs of countries in fragile situations that require financial support and have limited capacity to advance reforms to restore macroeconomic stability (International Monetary Fund 2016).

In the last two decades, a number of new informal groupings have emerged, especially in the developing world. South Africa played a key role in the establishment of the India–Brazil–South Africa Dialogue Forum in 2003 and joined the BRICS three years after it was established by the BRIC. These clubs are vehicles for contestation in existing institutional sites, as they enable South Africa and the other members to coordinate positions on a number of issues of global governance. They also help to spearhead new sites of institutional contestation, such as the New Development Bank (NDB).

IBSA’s work in development cooperation is largely driven through the IBSA Fund and is regarded as a key pillar of SSC. The 2010 Brasilia Declaration of IBSA outlined the basic principles of SSC (India, Brazil, South Africa [IBSA] 2010). These were reaffirmed by the IBSA states in a declaration on SSC in June 2018. The declaration emphasised that at the core of SSC lies “[r]espect for national sovereignty […]. SSC is about interdependences and not ‘new dependencies’. The partner countries themselves initiate, organise and manage SSC activities”. It went on to note that the “primary responsibility towards development rests with the States themselves under their ownership and leadership”. SSC is voluntary in nature and it is an expression of solidarity. The declaration emphasised that SSC was not aid, nor was it obligatory, as ODA was (IBSA 2018, Principles).

In 2004, IBSA established the India, Brazil, and South Africa Facility for Poverty and Hunger Alleviation (IBSA Fund), which was granted the MDG Award for its various successful and innovative projects in countries such as Burundi, Cambodia, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and Palestine. The fund, which had cumulative contributions amounting to $35.1 million, according to its 2018 report, worked with 19 partner states, nearly two-thirds of which were least-developed countries. The mandate of the fund is to “support projects on a demand-driven basis through partnerships with local governments, national institutions and implementing partners” (IBSA Fund 2018, p. 2).

The BRICS has been the preeminent South-South club for South Africa since it joined in 2011. In a speech in 2012, South Africa’s international relations and cooperation minister highlighted that its membership had three objectives: to advance South Africa’s national interests; to promote its regional integration programme and related continental infrastructure programme; and to partner with key players in the South on issues related to global governance and its reform (Department of International Relations and Cooperation, South Africa [DIRCO] 2012). It is clear that, for South Africa, the BRICS group provides an opportunity to leverage financing for Africa’s infrastructure development in the priorities set out by NEPAD and Agenda 2063. The NDB is another important instrument for this objective. The Africa Regional Centre was established in Johannesburg in 2017, but the NDB’s membership has not yet expanded beyond the five initial members to enable it to lend to other developing countries. In addition, South Africa and the other BRICS continued to engage constructively in global processes, the most notable of which were the Paris Agreement and the SDGs. But they also created new mechanisms or institutions such as the Contingency Reserve Arrangement and the NDB. There thus emerges a clear effort, only made possible by China’s significant financial clout, to explore “outside options” (Roberts et al. 2018).

The global development agenda and the structures created to manage it form an important dimension of South Africa’s foreign policy priorities. The country has played an active role in the most important development structures at various times and in various forms since the end of apartheid. It has recognised the impactful role that a host country can play in global summits when it hosted the WSSD. Equally, it has selected to chair important groupings of the Global South at critical junctures in global development debates. While respecting the legitimacy of agreements made in the formal multilateral bodies, South Africa has also been pragmatic in recognising that smaller informal clubs can play a significant role in advancing particular issues, especially where agreement among a few systemically important countries will make all the difference.

Starting from the Accra HLF in 2008, the process of a more coherent and united voice for African issues began to form. The Africa Platform for Development Effectiveness (APDev) was endorsed at the 15th AU Summit in July 2010 and launched in March 2011. Managed by the NEPAD Agency, its focus was on providing coordination for a common voice for Africa’s development perspectives, including SSC, aid effectiveness, and capacity development, which were the core focal areas of the platform.

By the time of the Busan HLF in 2011, Africa, for the first time, had a common position on development effectiveness, drawing on the outcomes of three regional meetings driven by the NEPAD Agency⁸ under APDev that were held in Pretoria, Tunis, and Addis Ababa between March 2010 and September 2011.

This approach continued for other important global debates. The Africa Action Plan on Development Effectiveness⁹ was adopted by the AU and its members in advance of the first HLM of the GPEDC in Mexico in April 2014. The action plan articulated, among other things, the challenges faced by middle-income countries, a broad definition of domestic resource mobilisation (going beyond tax), and the importance of regional organisations in development. It also proposed specific ideas to address them (NEPAD 2014). In the build-up to the adoption of the 2030 Agenda, the AU Summit in January 2014 adopted a Common African Position on the post-2015 Development Agenda (CAP). Africa and the rest of the developing world regarded these negotiations as a “unique opportunity to right the wrongs of the past and make any future development framework reflect the priorities and needs of the people most affected by poverty and inequality” (Nganje 2017, p. 61).

Formulating the common position was a difficult process. A number of issues that were to prove contentious in the UN process—both the Open Working Group (OWG) and the Intergovernmental Negotiations (IGNs)—played themselves out in the African context as well. For example, the peace and security pillar in the CAP elicited opposition from a number of African states. There were different interpretations of what this meant. South Africa’s interpretation, for example, was based on the notion of human security, whereas Rwanda and Uganda regarded this as referring to state security (Nganje 2017, p. 75). SDG 16, which covers peace, justice, and strong institutions, was equally contentious within the UN process. Overall, however, the African process was fairly consultative and inclusive, with both state and non-state actors making inputs. There were also strong links with Agenda 2063 that had been developed earlier.

There have been other instances where Africa has adopted a common position (on climate change and on UN Security Council reform). Common positions on their own do not ensure that the continent’s voice is stronger. It is also true that because the 54 states are so different, a common position may help to articulate shared priorities to guide negotiations but may be less able to shape outcomes or promote the continent’s collective interest (Nganje 2017, p. 68). However, by working on a common voice, Africa has been systematic in its articulation of its priorities in all the development fora and, although traction is not easy, persistence has brought some outcomes. In the negotiations on the SDGs, most Africans working through the G77 + China stood their ground regarding SDG 16 on peace and security, which was key in ensuring that the G77 did not drop it and that the goal was eventually adopted (Kamau et al. 2018, p. 203).

African voice and participation have grown steadily in global development debates. The coordinating role of the AU and NEPAD in the preparation for global debates or initiatives has been key in this regard, but so too has the active role that certain African states and individuals have played. The section below discusses African involvement in the negotiations on the SDGs and the post-2015 development agenda as well as the Global Partnership process.

The SDGs were negotiated by the OWG, which comprises 70 members. Eleven African countries participated in the OWG: Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Ghana, Benin, Kenya, Tanzania, Congo, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The OWG was co-chaired by Kenya’s Macharia Kamau and Hungary’s Csaba Korosi. The process of selecting the co-chair from the South was quite fraught, with a number of developing countries (including Egypt) preferring Brazil. The reason for this is that most G77 + China countries believed that their interests would be better served by a co-chair from one of the emerging powers because they felt that African states (excluding South Africa) could be easily manipulated by the North. “Kenya was considered a Trojan horse for the Europeans and [the UN Environment Programme]” (Kamau et al. 2018, p. 60). Nevertheless, Kenya was able to deal with the concerns raised, and Kamau was nominated as co-chair by the G77.

The role that Kamau and Korosi played in driving the process of determining and adopting the SDGs, using a very open, transparent, and inclusive process, cannot be underestimated in ensuring a successful outcome and the overwhelming acceptance across the board of a set of goals.¹⁰ Far from being a Trojan horse, Ambassador Kamau managed the process with his co-chair in a fair and non-partisan manner, ensuring that all views were heard and considered. It was equally significant that he was also made co-facilitator of the IGN process on the post-2015 development agenda by the president of UNGA, Uganda’s foreign minister, after the OWG had completed its work.

Although in his position as co-chair and co-facilitator he was not representing Africa, his achievements were important in dispelling earlier myths that Africans could not be independent.

It is important to note that the IGN process on the post-2015 development agenda had three Africans in senior positions. The president of UNGA in 2015 was the Ugandan foreign minister, the co-facilitator was Kenyan, and the chair of the G77 + China was South Africa. Kamau et al. remarked that “often negotiations get into trouble when the chair of the G77 has a different agenda than the co-chairs or co-facilitators” (Kamau et al. 2018, p. 219). This was not so in the case of South Africa, and cooperation among the president, the co-facilitators, and the G77 was at the “highest level” (Kamau et al. 2018, p. 219).

South Africa’s role as chair of the G77 + China was strategic, as it led the group in both the post-2015 development agenda negotiations and the Financing for Development process. South Africa supported the co-facilitators at the IGNs in advocating that the SDG discussions (once they had been finalised in the OWG) would not be reopened during the IGN process, as this would have upset the “delicate political compromise” (Kamau et al. 2018, p. 221). South Africa also argued on behalf of the G77 that the post-2015 agenda had to respect the national policy space of members.

Developing countries, and Africa in particular, were emphatic throughout the OWG process that the SDGs should not divert attention from the implementation of the MDGs, and that there should be a direct link between the two, including the post-2015 development agenda. The area of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR) was another point of emphasis that made it into the text.

In the OWG process, which was open to all UN members, irrespective of whether they had a formal seat on the working group or not, African states displayed a mixture of progressive and conservative approaches to issues. Kamau et al. (2018) identify Kenya, Botswana, Ghana, and South Africa among the former, especially on issues such as the green and the blue economy and renewable energy, whereas countries such as Uganda and Nigeria were far more conservative on LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) rights and sexual and reproductive health (Kamau et al. 2018, p. 110). Kamau et al. recount that, at key moments, countries such as South Africa, Botswana, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Ethiopia were called on to support the chairs in keeping the momentum of the process going (Kamau et al. 2018, p. 158).

South Africa represented the G77 in the negotiations on FfD that led to the AAAA. South Africa emphasised from the outset in its interventions that this was a separate process and its scope needed to go beyond the discussion on financing the SDGs (Kamau et al. 2018, p. 232).

Overall, the final FfD document, the AAAA, did not reflect some of the biggest concerns of African states and the G77 + China. CBDR was not as explicitly set out, neither was the need by developed countries to honour the 0.7 per cent of gross national income commitments, or that climate financing had to be additional to ODA commitments. For South Africa and many other developing countries, the debate on IFFs was also not reflected adequately in the outcomes, and the failure to agree to upgrade the UN Tax Committee to an inter-governmental body was also a disappointment (Kamau et al. 2018, pp. 234–235).

Since the establishment of the GPEDC, many African states and the AU have participated in it and regard it as an important platform for discussing development effectiveness. Egypt was the chair of the Post-Busan Interim Group (PBIG).¹¹ After Busan, Rwanda and Mali represented Africa in the PBIG and the AU, and its institutions were active in developing and projecting Africa’s position in these discussions. Rwanda and the United Kingdom took the lead in finalising the indicators in the PBIG. These 10 indicators were approved in June 2012 at the final meeting of the Working Party on Aid Effectiveness.

When the GPEDC was launched in mid-2012, Nigeria became one of the co-chairs, together with the United Kingdom and Indonesia.¹² Chad was the other African country on the Steering Committee. The AU and NEPAD worked jointly to support the post-Busan implementation and to consolidate and coordinate African views. At the 19th AU Summit, it was agreed that the AU would request membership of the GPEDC (2012).

In 2014, Malawi became co-chair with the Netherlands and Mexico; Egypt, the AU, and NEPAD served on the Steering Committee. From 2015, Kenya also participated in the Steering Committee as host of the 2016 HLM, and Uganda became one of the co-chairs after the 2016 HLM. The other two co-chairs were Bangladesh, representing developing countries that were donors and recipients, and Germany, representing donor countries. An African country has always been one of the co-chairs. The rotation of African countries is managed through the AU, as is the election to the GPEDC co-chairmanship.

The NEPAD Agency is a permanent member of the Steering Committee and the official Secretariat of the GPEDC in Africa. Having NEPAD sit on the Steering Committee provides stability in terms of content, rather than the constant rotation among African states, which, while democratic, makes it extremely difficult to achieve continuity and a degree of expertise in the process. In 2016, Africa gained an extra seat on the Steering Committee. The continent now has four seats (one co-chair, the AU and NEPAD, and two African countries).

NEPAD and the African continent are part of a number of Global Partnership Initiatives (GPIs).¹³ In 2015, the GPI on Results and Mutual Accountability piloted the Programme on Enhanced Use of Country Results Frameworks (CRFs). The initiative aims to reinforce improved use of country results frameworks to measure the impact of development cooperation in line with National Development Plans (NDPs), Agenda 2063, and the 2030 Agenda. The enhanced use of CRFs drawn from NDPs is essential in linking the critical functions of planning, budgeting, and implementation towards attaining sustainable developmental results.

Currently, the initiative has 10 African countries: Madagascar, Malawi, Benin, Burundi, the DRC, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Mozambique, and Cameroon. Somalia requested to join as of 2018, which brings the total to 11 participating countries. The NEPAD Agency’s Capacity Development and Monitoring and Evaluation divisions are collaborating to have a unified AU tracking and monitoring mechanism of development results for Agenda 2063 and the 2030 Agenda. In addition, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, and Uganda are among the 10 pilot countries on enhanced effectiveness at the country level that will feed into the Global Compendium of Good Practice (GPEDC 2018).

In 2018, the NEPAD Agency was conducting development finance assessments and integrated financing strategies and plans training to African countries to enhance capacities for the effective mobilisation of sustainable development finance.

Under the framework of the GPEDC, the NEPAD Agency and the UNDP Regional Service Centre for Africa are collaborating on the African South-South Cooperation Reporting Initiative. The programme aims to provide concrete evidence to inform policies and partnerships showing that South-South trade, partnerships, and investments have the potential to accelerate improvements in social and industrial sectors by harnessing technology, knowledge, and experience. This will help stimulate, foster, and enable sustainable South-South investments for the achievement of NDPs and Agenda 2063.

Africans on the GPEDC Steering Committee have consistently highlighted the importance of linking the GPEDC process to the UN processes—both the SDGs and FfD. For example, at the fourth Steering Committee meeting in Washington, DC, in October 2013, the Nigerian co-chair, Minister Okonjo-Iweala, indicated that work done within the Global Partnership on how effective development cooperation can mobilise domestic resources should be fed into post-2015 discussions, including the work of the Intergovernmental Committee of Experts on Sustainable Development Financing (GPEDC 2013).

As with the concern about abandoning the MDGs in favour of a new framework, so too have Africans in the GPEDC constantly reiterated the importance of not neglecting the unfinished business of the aid agenda, including use of country systems, transparency, untying aid, and predictability. The 15th meeting of the Steering Committee in 2018 endorsed a proposal to develop a Global Action Plan on Unfinished Business (GPEDC 2018).

African states also advocated for the establishment of an independent Monitoring Advisory Group. This proposal had emanated from a regional consultation that the AU and NEPAD had held in Kinshasa in November 2014 (GPEDC 2015). In 2015, the GPEDC established a Monitoring Advisory Group to provide technical expertise and advice to strengthen the Global Partnership monitoring framework and to ensure relevance to the post-2015 context.

Many Africans, both state and non-state actors, recognise that the GPEDC is a forum that gives them an opportunity to hold development partners to account. Among African states, Kenya has shown an increased level of engagement and leadership on global development and South-South discussions. In 2009, it hosted the High-level United Nations Conference on South-South Cooperation. In July 2016, Kenya hosted the fourteenth session United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, and in November 2016, it hosted the Second GPEDC HLM. At the announcement of its hosting, a senior official in the Ministry of Devolution and Planning said that “Kenya will lead the talks to ensure that a notable outcome for Africa and the developing world will be declared in Nairobi, which will shift relations between development partners and recipient countries” (“Kenya to host global aid coordination meeting”, n.d.). During the 71st UNGA in 2016, Kenya expressed the view that the fact that international cooperation remained at the core of the SDGs highlighted

the importance of global partnerships and, in particular, the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation. This partnership has a special role in accelerating delivery of development outcomes as effectively, fairly and efficiently as possible, with particular attention to least developed countries. (Permanent Mission of the Republic of Kenya to the United Nations 2016, p. 3)