On Wednesday, about 35 people representing a range of Mozambican civil society groups met at a Maputo hotel to draft a statement on the African Development Bank. The meeting took place as the AfDB held the formal opening ceremony for its 43^rd annual meeting a couple miles away at the beach-front Chissano Convention Center. 

The meeting was hosted by the Grupo Moçambicano da Dívida (Mozambique Debt Group), which had also sponsored a preparatory meeting 10 days earlier.

The statement, over three pages long, makes demands for greater responsiveness, autonomy, and relevance on the part of the AfDB. 

The issues that most concerned those assembled included the AfDB’s insistence on performing an assessment of each recipient country’s policy performance separate from any other. In Mozambique, the so-called G-19, a grouping of donor agencies, performs an annual assessment, but the AfDB declines to use that document. The AfDB assessments are used for the “performance-based allocation system” – similar to the World Bank’s CPIA ratings – to determine what share of the Bank’s available funds will be allocated to each individual country. It was recently targeted by the “high-level panel” co-chaired by former Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano and former Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin. The panel said the PBA system subjected countries to too-frequent assessments, introducing uncertainty to budget decisions, disrupting regional projects where partner countries might have divergent ratings, and judging countries on their adherence to orthodox policies rather than results. It suggested elimination or serious reform of the PBA system, but that recommendation does not seem to have made it onto the immediate agenda of the AfDB.

Participants were also concerned that the AfDB requires that recipient countries contribute 10% of the costs of any AfDB project. This, they said – apparently reflecting comments made by Mozambican finance ministry officials – resulted in project delays and in poor evaluations of the government, which gets accused of not making good use of the funds available to it, when it is lack of funds in the national treasury that prevents it from meeting AfDB requirements. 

This issue drew the most debate, with a compromise for the final statement. The nuances of that compromise eluded me, alas, since I don’t speak Portuguese.

Complaints were aired that the AfDB insists that countries use its procurement procedures, in contrast to the World Bank’s recent move to allow the use of “country systems” (though that is more a middle-income country phenomenon).   

The other issue drawing substantial debate was the failure of the AfDB to pay taxes on the goods imported into Mozambique for AfDB projects. Frustration was expressed that donors had devoted a great deal of energy insisting that the Mozambican government not exempt any importer from taxes, only to have the AfDB refuse to pay those taxes. Several people stated that the government ended up having to pay the taxes, though it seems to me this would mean it was essentially just moving money from one department to another.

Other demands made in the final statement which required less discussion include: 

- “More alignment with national plans and objectives in order to better respond to the needs of the country, namely a) orientation of assistance to development of infrastructure at district level; b) promotion of balance between agriculture for the market and promotion for food security; c) concrete actions of support for farmers for an increase to their production and productivity, e.g. agricultural credit with concessional interest rates, production inputs, extensions services, etc.; and d) prevention of the occurrence of situations involving expropriation of the farmers’ land.

- “Adoption of a plan to monitor and evaluate at a national level the specific projects financed by the AfDB.” 

- Strengthened country offices such as the one in Maputo.

- Reform of AfDB internal governance to increase its sovereignty and protect the interests of African member states.