Dot Keet
October 2002

There is a lively debate within African civil society as to how or whether African non-governmental (NGOs) or civil society organisations (CSOs) should ‘engage’ with the inter-governmental NEPAD.

As NEPAD was placed piecemeal on the public stage internationally, during 2000 and 2001, and then eventually made fully public within Africa in the last months of 2001, NEPAD received mixed but generally critical responses from African NGOs and broader social movements, trade unions, church-based and academic researchers, and even many media analysts across the continent. On the other hand, some African civil society organisations and analysts welcome NEPAD and support it both in its aims and its content.

• many focus on the process of  NEPAD’s formulation, and the absence of appropriate and wide-ranging prior public consultation on its very conceptualisation, and in the various  phases of its subsequent elaboration and global promotion;
• others focus more on the overriding external orientation, and the basic motivation of the document as a ‘fund-raising project’ designed to reassure and encourage foreign investment and increased Northern government ODA (overseas development aid) to Africa;
• yet others analyse in some detail the overall paradigmatic framework within which the programme is situated, or the theoretical concepts that are employed within its proposals, and the substance and implications of its specific projects
• and some analyses combine various or all of these dimensions..

However, cutting across these different approaches or emphases, there is a lively debate within African civil society as to how or whether African non-governmental or civil society organisations (CSOs) should now ‘engage’ with the inter-governmental NEPAD

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