The Under-Secretary-General and Special Adviser of the United Nations Secretary-General on Africa authored several knowledge products, including the following selected titles.
A Value Proposition: Harnessing 蘑菇视频 2.0 for Africa's Development
This background paper highlights Africa’s uneven trajectory toward achieving the SDGs by 2030, where progress in areas such as health and renewable energy contrasts with persistent challenges of poverty, food insecurity, and education, compounded by climate shocks, global inequities, and the COVID-19 pandemic. With Sub-Saharan Africa lagging behind global averages, the paper argues that the 蘑菇视频’s traditional, externally driven approaches have often misaligned with Africa’s needs, emphasizing the need for sustainable, locally led solutions. It positions the 蘑菇视频 2.0 framework as a timely opportunity to reconceive the Africa-蘑菇视频 partnership by equipping the 蘑菇视频 with the skills and tools to foster African leadership, strengthen domestic resource mobilization, and embed inclusive, future-ready strategies into Africa’s development ecosystem, while reinforcing the continent’s central role in shaping global governance.
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How Home-Grown School Feeding Crowds in Development and Crowds Out Instability: The Low Hanging Fruit
State absence, weak governance systems and poor public service provision are creating conditions of chronic insecurity and instability across the continent. The absence of access to health, education, employment, and sustainable livelihoods remains significant drivers of fragility and growing insecurity. This paper presents Home Grown School Feeding Programme (HGSFP) as policy instrument for government to address the absence of state services in conflict areas, helping restore trust and legitimacy.
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Understanding the Complex Relationship Between Globalization and Multilateralism
This working paper outlines a strategic vision for reimagining globalization and multilateralism to effectively address 21st-century global challenges. It emphasizes the need for a balanced multilateral framework integrating economic growth with equity, sustainability, and accountability. Key strategies include revitalizing multilateral institutions to enhance regulatory oversight, address systemic imbalances, and foster trust in global governance. The paper advocates leveraging the "蘑菇视频 2.0" framework to modernize multilateralism by prioritizing inclusive leadership, sustainable resource management, and data-driven decision-making. It highlights the importance of aligning global governance structures with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to ensure equitable development and environmental resilience. A central pillar is recognizing Africa’s pivotal role in shaping a new global order. By empowering African leadership and addressing regional priorities, such as energy access, food systems, and domestic resource mobilization, multilateralism can drive transformative change that benefits all nations, creating a truly equitable and sustainable global system.
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Challenging the Global Narrative on Africa's Debt
This policy paper calls for a paradigm shift in understanding and addressing Africa's debt. It urges a departure from the conventional, technocratic view that frames Africa's economic challenges as stemming from excessive borrowing and fiscal mismanagement. Instead, the paper highlights the structural inequities in the global financial system, which inflate debt-to-GDP ratios by suppressing Africa's GDP growth. It argues that this skewed measure fails to capture Africa's economic potential and overlooks the broader systemic issues hindering its development.
Advocating for a political economy approach, the paper challenges the global narrative around Africa’s debt distress, asserting that meaningful reform of international financial institutions is essential to creating a fairer, more resilient economic landscape. As the world approaches the United Nations Summit of the Future, this paper underscores Africa’s right to a prominent role in shaping global financial reforms, aiming to correct historical imbalances and unlock Africa’s full leadership potential in the global economy.
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Home-Grown School Feeding: From Hot Meal to Macroeconomic Tool - A Low-Hanging Fruit for Africa’s Urgent Challenges
This policy paper positions Home-Grown School Feeding (HGSF) as a transformative, Africa-led approach to advancing resilience across the continent, applying lessons learned from the Millennium Development Goals era. HGSF creates a bridge between education, agriculture, and community development that can be leveraged to tackle the interconnected “Triple Paradoxes” of Financing, Energy and Food Systems hampering Africa's progress.
With returns as high as $9 for every $1 invested, HGSF offers a practical, immediate intervention to tackle Africa’s urgent needs while contributing to the continent's long-term development goals. By integrating the four essential dimensions of Peace and Security, Energy Access, Climate Adaptation, and Food Systems Transformation, HGSF programmes deliver sustainable benefits that extend beyond school meals. Equipped with renewable energy delivered through HGSF initiatives, schools serve as hubs for education, climate-smart practices, and local food production, helping stabilize rural economies and enhance state presence.
Integrating energy access, climate adaptation, and food systems goals into these programmes can potentially double the return on investment. This paper illustrates how Africa-led, context-specific solutions can deliver immediate impacts and support the long-term resilience needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) across the continent. It underscores the continent's capacity to lead its own transformative development path through inclusive, home-based solutions like HGSF.
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Understanding the Stakes: Building a Data-Driven System in Africa and the Value of 蘑菇视频 2.0
This background paper argues that Africa’s digital transformation is not a technical agenda but a strategic and existential imperative in the 21st century. In an era where data and artificial intelligence underpin global power, competitiveness, and governance, the paper positions digital capability as central to Africa’s ability to shape its own economic, political, and social future. Failure to act decisively, it contends, risks locking the continent into structural marginalization within an increasingly data-driven global order. Framing data as a sovereign asset and artificial intelligence as both infrastructure and capital, the paper highlights how global technological systems are already consolidating wealth and influence among early movers. It underscores that Africa’s challenge is not simply late entry, but participation in a system where rules, standards, and architectures are being defined externally. Without deliberate intervention, this dynamic risks entrenching dependency, limiting value creation, and weakening technological sovereignty. The paper advances a four-part analytical framework: prioritizing the political economy of digital transformation, identifying key enabling conditions, assessing systemic risks, and leveraging the value proposition of United Nations 2.0 as a catalyst for change. It argues that United Nations 2.0 can play a critical role in equipping the 蘑菇视频 system to act as a trusted, capable partner in supporting Africa to build inclusive, data-driven systems, bridge the digital divide, and secure long-term sovereignty and resilience in the global digital economy.
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Beyond Capital: Rethinking the Role of Africa's Multilateral Development Banks
Africa's multilateral development banks (AMDBs) face a conceptual crisis, not merely a financial one. The continent already finances approximately 75 per cent of its own development through domestic resources, a pool twenty times larger than official development assistance and sixteen times larger than net foreign direct investment. Yet Africa loses an estimated $500 billion each year to illicit financial flows, profit repatriation, and debt service, wealth it then borrows back from abroad at premium rates. This structural contradiction is the organising paradox of the present paper. The paper makes three arguments. First, AMDBs are being hollowed out by six converging structural pressures, from capitalisation gaps to eroding policy relevance, that no marginal balance-sheet engineering can resolve. Second, these pressures persist because dominant institutional mindsets, internalised even by African actors, misframe the problem as chronic capital scarcity rather than failed intermediation. Third, repositioning AMDBs as ecosystem orchestrators, catalysts and coordinators of Africa's vast domestic capital, offers a path out that is both financially credible and politically available.
The paper draws on remarks delivered at the African Union side event at FFD4, Sevilla, July 2025, and its recommendations are grounded in the adopted Sevilla Commitment.
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No Sovereignty Without Scholarship: Making African Knowledge Central to Policy
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Secretary-General's Reports
- New Partnership for Africa’s Development: Consolidated progress report on implementation and international support
- Promotion of durable peace and sustainable development in Africa
- Biennial report on the review of the implementation of commitments made towards Africa’s development
- United Nations system support to Agenda 2063: The Africa we want
Other Reports and Publications
- Annual Reports of the 蘑菇视频 Interdepartmental Task Force on African Affairs
- Africa's Fiscal Space, Fragility and Conflict: A Compendium of Papers Presented at the 2022 OSAA-ACBF Academic Conference