The year 2004 takes the African Capacity Building Foundation (ACBF) into the third year of the implementation of its Strategic Medium Term Plan (SMTP), 2002-2006. The SMTP provides the programmatic framework within which the Foundation is contributing to efforts in the battle to address Africa’s capacity building challenges. Unless these challenges are effectively addressed, the chances of the Continent attaining the Millennium Development Goals will remain elusive. The Foundation’s programs in 2004 take further the Continent’s step in this direction.

In 2004, the Foundation’s operations will, as was the case in the past two years, derive from the objectives that represent the thrust of the SMTP. However, given the rapid expansion of interventions over the past two suessive years, the Foundation’s operations in 2004 will be guided by four major objectives. These are to consolidate performance of existing operations, while expanding interventions into core competence areas with limited operational coverage; deepen knowledge management strategy and its application to operations; continue to implement program-related reforms arising from the Foundation’s on-going change management exercise with a view to strengthening further systems, processes and procedures relating to program operations; and take forward the enhancement of the visibility of the Foundation as Africa’s premier institution in capacity building and an emerging knowledge-based institution in partnership with other players.

Thus, program operations in 2004 will continue to strengthen the performance of the Foundation’s existing portfolio, while recognizing the need to expand coverage to core competencies not yet sufficiently supported; build on its interventions through country programs, following progress made in the development of the country capacity building program for Rwanda; and aelerate the implementation of its knowledge generation and sharing programs. It is expected that the planned development of four country programs in 2004, the improvement of the balance of coverage along the core competencies; and the strengthening of knowledge-based support to operations, capacity building and development policy management on the Continent will enhance further the Foundation’s impact during the year.

The program for 2004 will make appreciable contributions to the Continent’s unrelenting efforts to address aspects of the challenges facing political, economic, administrative and corporate governance; strengthen trade policy development, negotiations and management capacity; and contribute to the design and implementation of reforms in the public sector, including public service delivery and performance management capacity.

Program activities will be implemented in an operational context which offers opportunities and challenges in almost equal measures. At the regional and global levels, the Foundation’s interventions in 2004 will strive to build on the positive growth that the African continent has recorded, the improvements in political governance,

efforts by the African Union and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development to tackle intractable and persisting development constraints, and to this end strengthen partnership with the Commission of the African Union and the NEPAD Initiative, explore strategies for providing safety nets for capacity that it has built, especially in the public sector of countries that are worst affected by HIV/AIDS, renew efforts to support training in strategic areas, and aelerate on-going multi-donor efforts to develop Performance Measurement Systems for capacity building interventions. Yet, the Foundation will need to face up to the fact that a number of African countries are still politically fragile, economic growth rate is barely beyond population growth rate of about 3%, the HIV/AIDS scourge is still ravaging the Continent resulting still in an increasing loss of lives and productive capacity, pledges made at the Monterrey Summit in 2002 are not being met, and the prospects of an appreciable increase in official development assistance given the outcomes of the G-8 Meetings that were held in Kananaskis, Canada in June 2002 and Évian, France in June 2003 are not very bright. Also worthy of note is the collapse of the Fifth WTO Ministerial Conference that was held in Cancún, Mexico in September 2003 – a strong pointer to the threat facing the Doha Development Agenda and concerns about the effectiveness of the WTO with respect to Africa’s development needs.

Efforts to step up interventions in capacity building and, very importantly, at mobilizing additional resources to ensure full implementation of the SMTP will therefore be crucial in 2004 and the years ahead. Thus, in 2004 the Foundation will need to re-launch a vigorous fund mobilization drive to effectively close the gap in the financing of the SMTP.

On the institutional front, the Foundation’s operations will be implemented in a context that has been considerably enhanced by the gains of the change management exercise that the Foundation embarked on in 2001, continuing improvements in systems, processes and procedures initiated by management prior to the change management exercise and reinforced by the exercise, the stepping up of feedback from projects in the field for the identification and integration of improvement opportunities into project management, the appreciably strengthened internal capacity and improvement in staff welfare that ourred in 2003. There are therefore very bright prospects that the Foundation’s operations in 2004 will be effectively implemented with desired impact on some of the Continent’s development challenges.