African Union Self-Sustainable Financing Reform and its Challenges

Abstract

The problem of overdependence on partner funding, overlapping and unclear mandate among organs, and limited institutional capacity were some of the major drives initiated the African Union (AU) institutional and financial reform. To improve the situations, the policy organs have taken number of financial reform-oriented decisions that recognize the need to take practical and concrete measures to self-sustainably finance its activities through contributions from Member States by achieving pre-set financial autonomous targets in 2020. Thus, this study examines the implementation of financing strategies to achieve its aspirations of financial autonomy and the challenges associated with the implementations of the decisions. Qualitative dominant mixed method was adopted and data were collected from key informants, archives of the African Union Commission, and other secondary sources such as articles, newspaper and websites. While the quantitative data were analyzed using simple descriptive statistics, the qualitative data were analyzed using thematic content analysis. It is found that soliciting sufficient funds from sources within Africa that makes it predictably and reliably finance its activities remain existential challenge to realize the aspired visions of the continent. The Union has been experiencing lack of consensus in negotiations and commitment in implementations among member states, and beset by ineffective oversight mechanism, donor-influence and interference, and inefficiency and lack of institutional capacity. It can be concluded that despite its strong aspiration to self-sustainable by the financial year 2020, the AU is in short of achieving targets of financing its activities; thus, it has remained largely dependent on partner funds.