An Analytical Framework for the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD)

The New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) is the brainchild of African Heads of State. It is the synthesis of a number of independently developed initiatives aimed at achieving the common goal of setting a course of action that will result in rapid growth and development for Africa. The main focus of NEPAD is to identify areas in which concerted efforts could help attain this objective. These priority areas can be arbitrarily grouped into two main categories: the sectoral priorities and the behavioural priorities. Priority sectors of NEPAD include Agriculture, Infrastructure, Education, Health, Environment, Energy and New technologies of information and communication. The present exercise seeks to propose a mathematical formulation of the goal of the NEPAD initiative and provide a solution to the optimization problem, making use of the tools of the modern theory of financial economics. The feasibility of the proposed solution is illustrated by a numerical example that attempts to demonstrate the simplicity and realism of the solution. The aim of the study is also to suggest an approach that is applicable to all African countries irrespective of their level of development or economic and political characteristics.