Developing Institution: a Guide for Sub-Sahara Africa

Book excerpt: This study is an effort to improve management operations in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). It is prompted by the appearance of a crisis in management development brought on by the difficult financial situation in that most countriesparticularly Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guineafound themselves by the 1990s. Growth and change in the management systems of Sub-Saharan Africa (Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea) had been achieved during the 1970s and 1980s, but serious problems had arisen in the 1990s regarding how to sustain these expanded systems of management and training. In part, the problems were financial, and in part, they were institutional, but in the final analysis, the failure lay in resource management and planning. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) ought to understand that what is needed is not yet another set of external recommendations to the countries on how to chart their development. Rather, there is a need for an understanding of why these countries, after decades of bank lending and other external aid, still appeared to be in need of external participation in the analysis of their problems.