Oil and Gas Management for Inclusive and Sustainable Development: An East African Regional Forum
Editor's Note: This report recaps the East Africa Regional Forum on oil and gas management for inclusive and sustainable development in Africa held on January 23-24, 2013, and jointly organized by the Economic Policy Research Centre, the Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and the Africa Growth Initiative.
- The forum participants deliberated freely on various gas- and oil-related issues and paid particular attention to how the East African countries can more effectively manage their newly discovered oil and gas resources so as to support economic and human development in the region and avoid the resource curse that has so frequently characterized many natural-resource-rich African countries.
- The region’s governments should know the extent of each country’s resource endowments since such knowledge is critical for making accurate revenue projections. Openness and transparency are critical for the efficient management of public revenues.
- There is an urgency to link a country’s resource potential to the national vision for development. Governments should be cautious about borrowing against expected revenues from their natural resources. The goal should be to exploit the resource in a sustainable manner.
Recent discoveries of commercially viable deposits of oil and gas in Uganda and Kenya, as well as ongoing efforts to improve and make oil production in South Sudan more efficient, have brought to the fore the need to revisit national policies for the exploration and exploitation of oil and gas reserves and the allocation of the revenues obtained from such activities. Informed discussions based on research and evidence on how best to efficiently and effectively manage East Africa’s natural resources are of critical importance at this stage of the development of these resources.
Thus, in order to deliberate on and critically explore these issues, leading policy think tanks in East Africa—the Economic Policy Research Centre (EPRC), Uganda; Kenya Institute for Public Policy and Analysis (KIPPRA); and Centre for Strategic Analyses and Research (C-SAR), South Sudan—in collaboration with the Africa Growth Initiative (AGI) at the Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., organized the two-day Forum on the Management of Oil and Gas Resources for Inclusive and Sustainable Development in Africa. The forum brought together 114 delegates from the East Africa region to deliberate on how to efficiently manage their oil and gas reserves.
The delegates engaged in rigorous debate about the exploration and exploitation of oil and gas, the efficient and equitable management of oil revenues and the management of the environment. Their particular focus was on how regional cooperation can enhance the efficient utilization of the region’s resources. In addition to sharing their experiences about managing an oil-based economy, they emphasized the importance of openness and transparency in the design and implementation of policies for the management of this nascent sector.
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