Delegates,
Hello, and welcome to Yale Model United Nations Taiwan IV. I am pleased to have the opportunity to be chairing our iteration of the United Nations Development Programme, and I’m sure our committee experience will be fun, educational, and dynamic.
A little bit about me: as you’re reading this, I’m finishing up my junior year at Yale studying Political Science. I’m from Asheville, North Carolina in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains, and my hobbies include hiking, reading, and watching sci-fi movies. At Yale, in addition to helping with model UN conferences, I work at a coffeeshop on campus, mentor a small group of students during the college application process, and work in the communications department of the Yale Cancer Center. I like to stay busy, and if I’m not working on topic guides or making coffee, you can generally find me in a corner with my nose in a book (or sleeping!).
As I said above, I am greatly looking forward to having you all in my committee. Feel free to reach out to me with any questions (ymunt.committees@yira.org) - really, any questions - from procedure quirks to committee topic clarifications, I’d be happy to help you out in any way I can.
Can’t wait to meet you all!
Best,
Jake
Committee History
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) celebrated its 50th birthday in 2016. That’s 50 years of fighting poverty, elevating the status of women, and advocating for equitable economic systems throughout the world. The UNDP, formed in 1965 by the combining of the Expanded Programme of Technical Assistance and the Special Fund, is the organ of the United Nations charged with ending poverty. This mission statement of encouraging economies around the world to be inclusive, accessible, and fair leads the UNDP to advocate for all sorts of issues that have economic roots and impacts, such as women’s rights, sustainability, and democratic governance.
The UNDP finds most of its influence in its role as an advisor to governments. It is structured with an administrator at its head, who oversees both regional bureaus covering collections of countries, and bureaus that provide administrative services and contribute to the overall mission of the organization. The UNDP directs a $5 billion budget and advocates for policies that it determines will ultimately eradicate economic inequality and promote each and every citizen.
The UNDP partners with local governments and helps them to meet goals related to establishing equality across all realms for all people. The UNDP typically focuses on helping nations develop along five distinct lines: democratic governance, poverty reduction, crisis prevention and recovery, environmental and energy issues, and combating HIV/AIDS. To help in all of these areas, the UNDP acts as an on-the-ground coordinator, helping connect local governments to NGOs and other resources, as well as acting in a consulting capacity, advising governments and helping them to strategize about how to best meet international goals about development.
In addition to working with local governments on real-time strategy, the UNDP stays active in producing research, publishing reports such as the Human Development Report, that provide data and goals for the near future in regards to global development. In this sense, they both act with local governments to implement standards, and make some global standards themselves through the compiling and analysis of data from around the world.
In sum, the UNDP is a United Nations organ charged with ensuring the sustainable development of every area in the world, with an emphasis on economic equality for all.
Topic History
African economic history is a story of a continent that has shown impressive economic strength despite the parasitic effects of intense slave trades and European colonization. These two events, as well as Africa’s vast natural and human resources, are the main subthemes in the continent’s economic history.
Slave Trades
Slavery, or involuntary servitude, is actually an umbrella term that covers a wide variety of systems by which people are forced into labor. The slavery that most had an impact on subsaharan Africa’s economic history is the slave trades by which native Africans were torn from their homes and sold into slavery in North and South America as chattel, or the complete economic property of their “owners.”
Modern scholars have found “a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves exported from a country and current economic performance,” or in other words, the countries that exported the highest number of slaves during the slave trades are experiencing the worst economic performance even today. The most significant of the slave trades, at least for examining the relationship between sub-saharan Africa and imperial powers, is the transatlantic slave trade, which involved the forced migration of between 12 and 15 million people from Africa to the Western hemisphere.
Colonialism
The European colonization of Africa (which occurred from the late 1800’s to the mid-1900’s) is without a doubt one of the biggest factors, if not the biggest factor, in determining African nations’ economic history and current economic situation.
Colonialism, at its heart, was the subjugation of the interests of one people (the colony) to the interests of the colonizer. This inequality wove its way into every fold of the colonial experience, but was particularly salient in the economic sphere of the imperial sprawl. In short, colonies were meant to provide their mother nations with economic power, and were never supposed to be drawing wealth from the colonizer; rather, “Africa was a net exporter of its wealth during [colonialism]."
The introduction of African nations into the colonial economic system drastically disrupted their economic development, which had already given many nations prominent positions including lucrative global trade. Once integrated into the colonial economic set-up, African nations occupied the periphery of the world economic sphere. Essentially, they became locations from which European nations would extract natural resources (emphasizing the production of singular cash crops, which are designed to bring profit as opposed to being used by the grower), manufacture these resources, then sell them back to populations in Africa (substituting the place of domestically produced goods, which had been the status quo before the imposition of colonialism).
This economic dependence and legacy of extraction was exacerbated by the fact that the colony was limited to exporting to the colonizer, and importing from the same; thus, the economic relationship was absolute and the fate of African nations’ was tied to the economic interests of the colonizers.
Another way in which colonialism had an impact, particularly on the post-colonial development of African nations, was in its alteration of existing social structures. The intense demands of the cash crop system drew women and children into the labor market, which helped to “irrevocably [alter] the social structure of many African societies and set the stage for later problems in African economic development."
Current Situation
Poverty still remains a significant problem plaguing sub-saharan Africa, despite positive economic outlooks. The question about economic growth is whom it is benefiting and how its fruits are being distributed.One of the key aspects of ensuring sustainable economic development in sub-saharan Africa will be the securing of investment to enable the building of infrastructure and provide capital for economic stimulation, which can then start to roll on its own and produce its own returns.Continental Africa currently shows an impressive amount of economic promise, though it won’t be without its challenges as it attempts to become an economic powerhouse while maintaining the goals of equality of economic opportunity as well as sustainability. Sustainable development essentially means ensuring the economic opportunity of the current generation while preserving economic opportunity for coming generations as well. The UN has 17 goals for sustainable development; at the core of these principles is the eradication of poverty, and the insurance that each citizen can live an economically viable life.
Diversity in Goal-Meeting Across Nations
One of the issues facing sustainable growth is the fact that not all countries in sub-saharan Africa have been meeting sustainable development goals at the same levels.
The fact of the matter is that different countries are facing different circumstances that are going to dictate how well they’re meeting these goals. These circumstances are political, economic, geographic, and societal to name a few categories that differentiate these nations.
A question worth considering would be how viable cross-national agreements to meet goals together in cooperative formats are, as opposed to countries individually trying to meet the goals themselves. The UNDP should consider how to best help governments meet the Millennium Development Goals, and how a Pan-African economic framework might help certain nations meet the goals, while keeping in mind the sacrifices they may be asking more progressive nations to make in entering such cooperations.
Key point: not all subsaharan African nations are meeting the MDGs at the same rates - some are doing comparatively better than others.
How should the UNDP recommend that nations stay on track with MDGs? What are the positives and negatives of a Pan-African model of accountability and mutual assistance?
Attracting Investment
One of the key aspects of ensuring sustainable economic development in sub-saharan Africa will be the securing of investment to enable the building of infrastructure and provide capital for economic stimulation, which can then start to roll on its own and produce its own returns.
As you can see from the included graphic, foreign investment in African nations is far from equal - the UNDP will work in its advisory capacity to work with governments to figure out how to make their countries more attractive to foreign investment. The ultimate goal of every sub-saharan African nation displaying sustainable economic development should be remembered as the UNDP works to help coordinate attempts to attract investment and direct the prioritization of investment in various nations.
Again, the diversity of African nations is key in considering how best to think about the best way to attract investment in sub-saharan Africa. Each nation has factors that investors will like and dislike, and these factors will mostly be grounded in the economies of each nation (though political considerations, in their effects on the economies of the countries they dominate, will also come into account), so the UNDP should consider how best to approach helping African nations market themselves to other nations.
A further nuance here is to think not simply about how to attract investment to individual nations, but also to think about investment in the region at a more macro level; the UNDP may consider the positives and negatives of encouraging a Pan-African economic framework to ensure the flow of investment to the region as a whole, with the added benefit of being able to delegate where funds will go.
Key point: investment is not equal across subsaharan Africa.
What role does the UNDP play in helping African nations market themselves for investment? If one subsaharan African nation gets funds that otherwise would have gone to another subsaharan African nation, are we any closer to our goal?
Eliminating Poverty
Poverty still remains a significant problem plaguing sub-saharan Africa, despite positive economic outlooks. The question about economic growth is whom it is benefiting and how its fruits are being distributed.
As noted in the graphic below, sub-saharan African nations have fared quite poorly in comparison to other areas of the world in the reduction of their populations facing extreme poverty. The UNDP should consider the strategies pursued in these nations who have more successfully dealt with the issue of extreme poverty and determine whether or not these strategies are also applicable to sub-saharan African nations.
Fighting poverty is not a simple task, but there are global models to draw on. The basic framework involves ensuring medical care, providing basic needs, and increasing access to education. These are broad topics, each with a number of constituent parts for which individual plans of action must be created.
Key point: subsaharan Africa has fared quite badly compared to other nations in the reduction of its poverty rates.
Why has poverty-fighting gone so poorly in subsaharan Africa? Are there certain circumstances in this region that other areas of the world have not faced, and if so, how do those considerations go into the plan of how to deal with poverty?
Suggestions for Further Research
There are some resources listed below that you can check out to dive into this topic a bit further.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/05/what-s-the-future-of-economic-growth-in-africa/
http://www.africaneconomicoutlook.org/
https://www.afdb.org/en/knowledge/publications/african-economic-outlook/
http://www.worldbank.org/en/region/afr/overview
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/africa-in-focus/
