Vice President calls on Africans to become self-supporting

Vice President John Dramani Mahama has called on Africans to establish domestic organisations that would enable them to monitor and evaluate their performance in various sectors, instead of their over-dependence on foreign and donor support.

He said their perennial engagement of such foreign organisations was not helpful to the continent as most of them were not accustomed to the African culture and values and at the end distort their historical origins.

Vice President Mahama made this call on Wednesday during the sixth African Evaluation Association conference under the theme: “Rights and Responsibility in Development Evaluation in Accra”.

The African Evaluation Association was founded in 1999 in response to a growing demand for information sharing, advocacy and advanced capacity building in evaluation in Africa.

The Association, which is an umbrella organisation of national monitoring and evaluation associations and networks in Africa was organised in Ghana by the National Development Planning Commission and the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana in collaboration with the secretariat.

Vice President Mahama appealed to member countries to focus their evaluations on the levels of poverty in the continent and device ways of mitigating such levels to make the region attractive to nationals of other continents.

He appealed to African groups and societies to mobilise, learn and engage themselves in re-positioning the continent in the areas of good governance, democracy and the rule of law in the coming years.

Mrs. Florence Etta president of Africa Evaluation Association, said development was about creating an enabling environment which would provide Africans to harness their full potential to exercise their rights.

She noted that the enjoyment of human rights could pave a way for the development and transformation of countries to better positions in all sectors of development.

Mr. Paul Victor Obeng, Chairman of the National Development Planning Commission, who chaired the programme, reiterated the relevance of empowering women in Africa as a collective responsibility of all Africans.

Source: GNA