Background, Mission and Activities

Background

Context

Parliaments have a long tradition of bilateral and multilateral cooperation on many levels and on a wide array of subjects. Many of agreements and partnerships exist among chambers and parliaments to carry out common activities or achieve shared goals. The last decade has witnessed a significant surge in international activities undertaken by legislatures. This has been accompanied by the establishment of new regional and transnational parliaments and by the creation of formal parliamentary assemblies, informal parliamentarians’ associations and networks of legislators. As the Inter-Parliamentary Union highlighted in a recent publication “One common feature of regional inter-parliamentary assemblies is the aim to foster greater integration and legislative coordination between member countries.”

Although the majority of these exchanges have taken place among members of parliaments, many assemblies have also engaged in bilateral or multilateral efforts directed at mutually strengthening, improving or evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of their administrations. Apart from the importance of political collaborations, it is in fact commonly acknowledged that frequent consultations, sharing of experiences, targeted knowledge transfers and the exchange of lessons learned are extremely important mechanisms to strengthen the human resources capacity needed by parliaments to perform a variety of critical tasks in support of their representative, legislative and oversight functions.

There is no doubt that the recent evolution and growth of technology has helped to intensify the number of exchanges and facilitate communication between parliaments and supporting institutions. But few people would challenge that global and regional coordination among all the parliaments involved needs to improve to ensure coherence of action, leverage the forces of many institutions, and foster better analyses of lessons learned.

The success of long established networks like the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) www.ncsl.org in the United States and the European Centre for Parliamentary Research and Documentation (ECPRD) ecprd.secure.europarl.europa.eu in Europe, both with more than 20 years of experience, underscores the value of these associations for parliamentary development. And their success suggests the opportunity to extend the benefits of cooperation to other regions and eventually to a global level.

Regional groups are a natural way to gather information from participating parliamentary bodies. Knowledge can be gained through a variety of channels, including conferences, virtual meetings, online discussion groups, and even simple e-mail exchanges. There are, of course, significant challenges in establishing and sustaining cooperation and collaboration. Differences in language, for example, can be a hindrance, especially when there are limited resources. Differences in the infrastructure or the technical approach preferred by individual parliaments can also limit sharing. However, by engaging as many entities as possible the burden on any single parliament can be reduced and the value of the benefits gained by sharing experiences and working together will certainly overcome the investments needed.

Rationale

The establishment of the Pan African Parliament (PAP) has also created new and legal compelling reasons to foster collaboration and exchange of information among African Parliaments, while the existence of regional parliamentary assemblies, like the East Africa Legislative Assembly (EALA), the Economic Community Of West African States (ECOWAS) Parliament and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Parliamentary Forum should be taken into account.  The time has come to create a formal framework to foster the exchanges among parliaments in Africa, between sub-regional groups, and between individual countries in different sub-regions.

Parliaments have to increasingly address regional and continental issues. Inter-parliamentary cooperation should not be limited to the political level between Parliamentary Committees and MPs or Speakers. Strengthening exchanges among parliamentary staff - the permanent core resource of Parliament - has become imperative for the benefits that sharing experiences and learning from best practices can provide in terms of improving skills and competence of parliamentary staff in Africa.

It is also commonly acknowledged that frequent consultations, sharing of experiences, targeted knowledge transfers and the exchange of lessons learned, are not just very important at the political level, but they are also extremely fruitful mechanisms to strengthen, the capacity of human resources in the parliaments needed to perform a variety of critical tasks within the parliamentary administrations.

Background

At a meeting hosted by the National Assembly of Nigeria in Abuja in March 2007 the opportunity to establish a continent-wide Africa Parliamentary Knowledge Network (APKN) was discussed among members and officials from twelve parliamentary delegations from African assemblies and the Pan-African Parliament. The meeting, supported by the United Nations, and taking place under the auspices of the Pan African Parliament, evaluated a number of options and possibilities relating to the establishment of the APKN.

Participants agreed on the need to establish the APKN with the aim of strengthening the information and knowledge management capacity of parliamentary administrations to better serve their institutions and members by promoting a continental level training and capacity building initiative for members of parliaments and parliamentary staff in the area of legislation, information & research and information technologies.

APKN was formally established at the International Conference on Africa Parliamentary Knowledge Network took place in Cairo, Egypt, on 4 and 5 June 2008.

The Conference brought together delegations from the Pan-African Parliament and the Parliaments of Algeria, Angola, Botswana, Burundi, Cameroon, Chad, Comoros, Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe as well as delegations from the SADC Parliamentary Forum and the East African Parliamentary Assembly.

Participants agreed on the text of the Charter for the Africa Parliamentary Knowledge Network to be submitted to their respective parliaments for endorsement. They committed to work with their parliament’s authorities to communicate the endorsement to the interim secretariat.

Participants welcomed the offer of the People’s Assembly of Egypt to host the interim Secretariat of the Africa Parliamentary Knowledge Network and collaborate with the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs until the establishment of a permanent Secretariat.

Participants also welcomed the offer of support made by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, through the “Africa i-Parliaments Action Plan”, for strengthening the Africa Parliamentary Knowledge Network.

Logo

The logo of the African Parliamentary Knowledge Network come from the Akan people of West Africa. It is the BOA ME NA ME MMOA WO - "Help me and let me help you" that is the symbol of cooperation and interdependence.

We think that it may well represent the ambitions of the Network that wants to build on its members' skills and experience in order to learn from best practices and improve skills and competence of parliamentary staff in Africa in a sustainable way.

Mission

The APKN will build on existing regional initiatives (e.g.Assemblée parlementaire de la Francophonie: Région Afrique;  Réseau Africain des Personnels des Parlements; the ICTs Network of the SADC region; et.) and favour the establishment of other regional networks while  providing a wider framework for the creation of greater synergies and and more sustainable common services thanks to a bigger critical mass and better economies of scale.

The Knowledge Network is meant to promote and enhance the sharing of ideas, experiences and good practices among parliamentary administrations in the areas of:

• Legislative Process
• Information and Research
• Information and Communication Technology (ICT)
• Communication and Public Information

These Thematic Networks will promote at a continental level the training and capacity development of parliamentary staff through the organization of seminars and training sessions, the establishment of online fora and shared services, the promotion of thematic working groups and information portals, etc.

The APKN strategic approach is to provide high value training and information services for parliaments in a cost-effective way while creating a critical mass necessary to build and sustain quality services.

More specifically the APKN will focus its activities on:

• Capacity Building. Building capacity is an important goal of the network. Parliaments that neglect their learning and training needs severely affect their ability to fulfil their constitutional mandate. Developing a capacity building strategy requires both the commitment of financial resources and up-to-date knowledge and a key understanding of the importance of ongoing training and education.
  Parliaments have to be able to make the transition to being a “learning organisation”, that is an organisation whose Members and staff have the opportunity to continually expand their capacity and skills and where new patterns of thinking are nurtured.
• Common information services and software applications. Shared ICT services and applications are more and more necessary both in dealing with the huge amount of information available and in effectively managing information within parliaments.

The APKN will have a strategic opportunity to cooperate in the development of capacity building activities and shared information services in a way that is currently not done in the parliamentary domain. While benefiting from a collaborative development effort, the role of actually delivering and using these services would be left to national parliaments and local training institutions that are better equipped to provide them in a cost effective fashion.

Activities

The following  framework of the activities of the African Parliamentary Knowledge Network (APKN) is the fist outcome of the parallels workshops held at the International Conference on the African Parliamentary Knowledge Network in Cairo, June 2008.

It is expected this very preliminary draft workplan will be discussed, updated, prioritised and eventually endorsed once the APKN Executive Committee will be in place. them as they deem appropriate and bring them into alignment with the Charter of the network that will be finalised at the Cairo's Conference.

No time frame or deadlines are included since the scope of this exercise is to determine the range of projects and related work the network may wish to undertake. For the same reason, a discussion of resources is deferred until agreement is reached on the initial activities. Resources can then be identified and plans and schedules can be formulated for subsequent approval.

Currently the “Africa i-Parliament Action Plan” Project of the UNITED NATIONS Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN/DESA) has committed to provide, for the duration of the Project, support to the “Africa Parliamentary Knowledge Network” by:

• supporting the coordination and planning of the “Africa Parliamentary Knowledge Network”;
• providing technical expertise to the Networks thematic areas and supporting the development of services for “knowledge-driven Parliaments”;
• sponsoring the organisation of the annual “Africa Parliamentary Knowledge Network” conference;
• maintaining a knowledge repository to serve as a reference point for advisory services, e-training, best practices, etc.;
• providing proof-of-concept implementations of ICT applications which can then be deployed in the African Parliaments.

The Executive Committee will seek the support the of development partners and donors and will also seek to engage the collaboration, among others, of long established parliamentary networks like the European Centre for Parliamentary Research and Documentation (ECPRD) ecprd.secure.europarl.europa.eu and the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) www.ncsl.org of the USA, but also also universities and excellence centre in Africa and elsewhere.