Note on new ECA intergovernmental machinery : the Conference of African Ministers responsible for the development and utilization of mineral resources and energy

Abstract

At the twenty-seventh session of the Commission/eighteenth meeting of the Conference of Ministers held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, from 20 to 23 April 1992, the ECA Conference of Ministers adopted resolution 726 (XXVII) on strengthening the Economic Commission for Africa to face Africa's development challenges in the 1990s. It particularly recommended in operative paragraph 6, the "establishment, within existing resources, of a consultative mechanism that would advise the Executive Secretary on the grouping of conferences along specific themes, including scheduling and the preparation of conferences, meetings, seminars, and workshops, taking into account the need to harmonize them with those of the Organization of African Unity and the African Development Bank, to avoid duplication and achieve greater efficiency." The operative paragraph, therefore, implicitly called for a rationalization of the intergovernmental bodies of the Commission. Indeed, a streamlined and more effective intergovernmental machinery would be able to respond better to the crucial and changing needs of the member States in the light of the restructuring exercise of the ECA secretariat and the revised Medium-term Plan, as well as to utilize fully the multidisciplinary advantage of the Commission and benefit from the synergetic effects deriving from the new ECA priority areas which resulted from the thematic clustering of subprogram’s and divisions.