The African Development Partnership

 

The African Development Partnership is an initiative by African youth that attempts to bridge the divide between today’s leaders and the youth by creating an environment for engagement between the two generations.

The African Development Partnership will seek to build capacity in key areas, tackling, every year, a particular theme. For the inaugural African Development Partnership, the focus will be geared toward youth leadership in sustainable development, under the theme titled, “Creating an Environment for Sustainable Development” in which the task will be finding a role for young leaders in sustainability-oriented action. A variegated panel of experts on the topic will be chosen to enrich the field of strategies for discussion and engage the floor in debate after presenting their own views. The whole process will be presided over by a "host", or mediator, who will manage discussions.

 The conference will be conducted in a panel discussion forum with each session tackling particular aspects of sustainable development. The panel will consist of decision-makers and experts in the public and private sector, civil society and academia. In each session students in attendance will be given the opportunity to interact with the panel and in this way meaningfully engage in sustainable development challenges.

 

Date: Wednesday, 27 February 2008

 

Venue: Wits University Great Hall

 

Model World Trade Organization

 

As the World Trade Organization is the platform where decisions are made and future trade is fostered, we think it is important to deal with the WTO and the way decisions are made to understand the current rules of world trade. With this in mind, we decided to create a 3 day simulation of the WTO - the Model World Trade Organization.

The Model WTO simulates a Ministerial Conference of the WTO to show how trade rules are developed and shaped by the negotiations of the WTO members. Ministerial Conferences, which take place every two years, are the main decision instruments of the WTO. The delegates of 145 countries decide on future steps of negotiations and agree in the implementation of declarations. The heading of the WTO is set by the Ministerial Conferences. The countries afterwards implement the decisions.

Target audiences for the conference are university students as participants, trade and development experts for specialised sensitisation on trade issues and international organisation representatives for indications of relevance. The participants will carry out the negotiations and the trade and development specialists will interact as guest speaker panellists during the conferences lecture series. The lecture series will provide an in depth specialised analysis of the inner workings of the WTO and the current state of the existing Trade Regime. The conference, aims to bring together 82 highly motivated students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, from different academic disciplines across African universities.

The conference aims to be in line with WTO technical cooperation activities that the WTO devotes entirely to helping developing countries operate successfully in the WTO multilateral trading system. The objective of Model WTO is to build the necessary capacity institutions and to train students by simulating the framework of the actual WTO negotiations.

 

 Date: June 2008

 

Case Writing Competition

 

The Case Writing Competition will present students with topical sustainable development challenges which leaders of today battle with daily. Through this project, students are given the opportunity to address these challenges. The strategy is to further awareness of and education on sustainable development while building human capacity among leaders of tomorrow by equipping them with tools and a platform to engage such issues in a meaningful way.

The programme provides institutions of higher learning the platform to influence knowledge production in meeting the needs of society; and allows decision-makers of today in the public and private sector, and civil society to tap into to the wealth of knowledge that these institutions offer. The end result is an all-inclusive approach in policy and practice toward a sustainable development framework.

The inaugural theme for the Case Writing Competition is Energy and Resource Management on the continent. While Africa has been endowed with an abundance of rich mineral, oil and gas deposits the continent is plagued with Dutch Disease and the Resource Curse: a combination of public and private sector corruption, human rights violation and economic backwardness and dependency on these resources. The objective of the inaugural Case Writing Competition will be to shape policy and practice within the Energy and Resource sector toward sustainability. The selected aspects of sustainability within the sector that the programme will tackle are namely good governance, economic progress and advancement in science and technology, alternative sources of energy. 

 

Date: September 2008