“The peopling of Africa: a blind spot in development policymaking?”

PARIS, France, January 14, 2015/African Press Organization (APO)/ -- Open to the media / Within the “DEV TALKS” Series You are invited to A conversation with Jean-Marie Cour on “The peopling of Africa: a blind spot in development policymaking?”

Friday, 16 January 2015

10:00 to 12:00

OECD Headquarters – Room D

Languages: English and French (with simultaneous interpretation)

Development economics was essentially designed in countries already populated and equipped, where issues of settlement and land use no longer had much importance. According to Jean-Marie Cour, it is both utopian, i.e. ignorant of the spatial dimension and regardless of people (aggregates from lead macroeconomic models are practically independent from population and its distribution) and "demo-static" (peopling is considered as a given rather than a variable). Thus, for example, development cooperation agencies tend to ignore the extent and consequences of demographic and territorial changes underway in sub Saharan Africa.

Based on his experience in “countries in their peopling years”, at the World Bank and at the OECD, JM Cour considers that improving our knowledge and the effectiveness of public policies will require more than increasing the number of indicators, devoting more resources on investigations, or introducing ever more sophistication in the statistical treatment of existing data.

The only answer is a paradigm shift. Proposals have been made, which aim to take account of space, interactions between population dynamics and behavior of actors, and the operating logic of the "informal sector": the demo-economic and spatial model developed in the context of the WALTPS and Ecoloc programmes of the Sahel and West Africa Club is one example.

This meeting with a key thinker and actor of this issue takes place in the context of the preparation of the African Economic Outlook 2015 edition by the OECD Development Centre, the African Development Bank and the UNDP, in partnership with CIRAD, on the theme "Spatial inclusion in Africa" (to be published in May 2015).

Participants will have ample opportunity to engage in a frank and interactive discussion with Jean-Marie Cour, following his presentation. To attend this event, journalists are kindly invited to register with [email protected].