Will Alexander, Professor Emeritus, Department of Civil and Biosystems Engineering, University of Pretoria. Email alexwjr@iafrica.com

It is imperative for the welfare of the people of the African continent that NEPAD should succeed. Unfortunately there has been a lot of woolly thinking, particularly by well-meaning scientists, that could endanger its implementation. This is even more critical in the light of the forthcoming World Summit on Sustainable Development. What is meant by sustainable development? More than 300 million people on the African continent live in conditions of sustained poverty. Why does the word sustainable have to be used at all? The target is simple - these people have to be lifted out of poverty. This can be likened to climbing out of a valley onto a plateau. The problem lies in climbing out of the valley, not in sustaining livelihoods once the plateau has been reached. The original meaning of sustainability referred to development without long-term detrimental effects on the environment. It is still used in this context. There is a widely held belief that a healthy environment will sustain a healthy population and consequently if the environment is sustained in a healthy state, the population that depends on it will also be healthy. This is a utopian view that is at variance with reality. Poverty exists precisely because the natural environments can no longer support the rural populations that depend on them. It is naive to assume that the overloaded environments can somehow be improved by legislating control measures that will lead to sustainable support to growing population. Legislation to protect the natural environment has been in force in South Africa and a number of African countries for several decades, but there is no evidence to suggest that this has resulted in an improvement of the lot of the poor communities in these countries, on the scale required to reverse the trend of increasing poverty. The objective of the much-lauded Agenda 21 of the 1992 Rio Summit was to maximise economic and social welfare without compromising the sustainability of vital ecosystems (emphasis added). This is an unacceptable order of priority. There should be no environmental impediments to the maximisation of economic and social welfare. For example, if the current legislation regarding the need for ecologically healthy river systems had been enacted fifty years ago, South Africa would now be dependent on desalinated seawater and our coalfields would have been depleted to provide the energy required for the desalination. The desalination costs would have comprised a sizable portion of the national economy. This is an intolerable situation where poverty exists. It is unfortunate that there have been no concerted moves by scientists to correct this misapprehension.

Towards a solution
There are no easy solutions and no single solution for all aspects of poverty alleviation. It will require a sustained multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional approach to generate a range of plausible, implementable solutions to a particular problem for the consideration of decision makers. The following are some personal views. States can be divided into three broad tiers of government. The upper tier is the administrative component. This is an essential component of society but it imposes a large economic burden on the national budget. The second tier is the productive component, which generates the wealth that supports the administrative component. The third tier is the unproductive and financially poor communities that also have to be supported by the financially active component. National prosperity can be enhanced either by decreasing the administrative and poverty burdens, or by increasing the productivity of the financially active component.

Reducing the administrative burden
The administrative burden increases directly with the degree of democratisation of society. For example, the devolution of authority from national to provincial, and from provincial to local authorities may be a democratic imperative, but it often results in the duplication of services and in a lack of capacity at lower levels. This in turn results in inefficient administration and inefficient expenditure of available funds. Pumping more funds into this tier of society will not lead to a reduction of poverty. Autocratic forms of government are more efficient, but are politically unacceptable, particularly by those who consider that the right to vote is more important that the right to survive. The optimum for national prosperity lies between these two extremes.

Increasing productivity
Increasing the productivity of the financially active component is the target of most proposals for poverty alleviation, yet it is difficult to see how this can be done on a scale that will relieve the hardships of millions of people on the African continent. Experience shows that increasing the wealth of the few usually widens the gap between the rich and the poor (nations and individuals) instead of closing it. In South Africa, the rate of unemployment continues to grow despite claims of increased national prosperity.

Directly decreasing poverty
Decreasing poverty directly on the scale of millions of people is the road that will have to be followed. It is also the most promising route for scientific innovation. The first task is the removal of obstacles to progress along the road. Here are some of them. The most important obstacle is the unfortunate linkage between sustainable development and environmental conservation. Contrary to popular belief, these are non-commensurate objectives in that one can only be achieved at the expense of the other. The following is an example from a recent policy statement. Hopefully, it was written by the public relations office and not by the Minister's professional advisers. The Minister said that a primary area was the development of the country's large State dams, which was now based on a sustainability plan that integrates the environmental, social and economic elements through consultation with local stakeholders, to find the optimal approach to unlock the full resource potential of the dam. Is this procedure achievable in practice? In technical terms this is a multi-objective optimisation procedure involving non-commensurate objectives, in that all objectives cannot be satisfied concurrently. Which components will have to be sacrificed to achieve the others? Who makes this decision - the stakeholders, or their elected representatives, or the Minister? What role will political expediency play? For example, one Minister proudly stated that he had carried a proposal in his satchel for 14 months before making a decision. This may have satisfied the concerns of the environmental lobby, but not those of the less articulate beneficiaries of the proposal. Scientific methods are available for solving these problems.

Multidisciplinary approaches.
The need for multidisciplinary approaches can be illustrated by several examples where well-meaning scientists made recommendations to governments on matters that were beyond their areas of expertise. One of these is the unsupportable claims that climate change will result in increases in floods and droughts, and that political decision makers should make financial provision to avoid the consequences. More than 1000 papers have been written on this subject, which is an average of one per day. It can be demonstrated without difficulty that these fears are groundless. Another equally damaging obstacle is the imposition of northern hemisphere solutions to African problems. There are examples where overseas institutions have financed development projects in Africa, but the money has ended up in the pockets of appointed planners and contractors from the donor countries. The local communities were saddled with the unaffordable operation and maintenance costs. There are many examples of successes and failures that could be studied before embarking on new projects, but these do not appear to have been collated to from a basis for future studies.

Finally
Few scientists are likely to waste their time on what they perceive as lost causes, but it is these lost causes that desperately need scientific attention. The publish or perish (now publish overseas or perish) requirement for advancement in academic institutions can be counter-productive. Research on large-scale poverty alleviation measures requires several years of patient multidisciplinary studies that have little likelihood of complying with the requirement of one publication per year in recognised journals. No quick-fix solutions are likely to be found. Multidisciplinary studies require coordination, but no national scientific coordinating body exists in this field. It is easier to be critical of existing approaches than to propose alternatives. However, these must be found if NEPAD is to succeed.

Footnote
Will research on waterless toilets ever come to an end?
http://www.scienceinafrica.co.za/2002/june/nepad.htm