The report highlight significant challenges that Africa faces which include global conflicts, climate change, post-COVID-19 recovery, and a cost-of-living crisis, leading to increased poverty and hunger. Many African economies are burdened with high debt, inflation, and limited access to development and climate financing. However, Africa is making positive progress on only 3 of the 51 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) targets, regressing on 8, and stagnating on the rest.

This report highlights several human rights challenges faced in 2023 which included human rights suppression, wartime atrocities, and selective government outrage caused by conflicts and crises. The renewed hostilities in Israel, Sudan, Ukraine, Myanmar, and Ethiopia caused immense suffering. The same year also had climate and economic issues i.e. it was the hottest year on record that led to wildfires, droughts, and storms, exacerbating economic inequality.

The powerful notion of human security has evolved, incorporating principles of justice while elevating nature and technology’s roles in safeguarding and enriching human life. Still, its original insight from over three decades ago holds true: secure nations require a sense of security, well-being, and belonging among their citizens too. This report emphasizes the importance of human security, which includes socioeconomic opportunities, environmental sustainability, and protection against violence.

East and Horn of Africa’s peace and security outlook still remains bleak. This is attributed to complex geopolitical and socioeconomic dynamics across the aforementioned regions.

This report does shed light on intersecting complexities in the global governance architecture. It offers a comprehensive roadmap for course correction in a divided world embattled by violent conflict, fragility, hyper-nationalism, refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs), pandemics, climate change-fueled crises, unchecked proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI), and growing tools of cyber-warfare.

Being third in series, the 2023 report authored by African Peer Review Mechanism on behalf of the African Governance Architecture (AGA) presents an analysis of the influences, causes, drivers and triggers of Unconstitutional Change of Government (UCG) in Africa. The analysis is identified by organs of the African Union (AU) and verified by an elaborate process of country targeted reviews.

The report was launched under the European Investment Bank’s (EIB) eighth annual Investment in Africa report covering the continent’s banking system. The report highlights that banking in Africa continues to show resilience and a desire to support Private Sector Development despite operating in a tough environment. Key banking indicators, such as capital ratios, profitability and non-performing loans, have not deteriorated despite the challenges the region is facing.

This report comes at the midway of the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development to which world leaders, including African leaders, made commitments in 2015, to end extreme poverty, inequality and climate change by 2030. In addition, the Ten-year implementation plan of the African Union’s Agenda 2063, titled, “the Africa We Want,” that was initiated in 2013, ends in 2023. This report is also paramount because it covers the period when the Covid-19 pandemic and the Ukraine-Russia crisis emerged with significant bearing on the implementation of both agendas.

This report highlights migration as one of the key emerging development issues. Approximately, a total of 84 million people (2.3 percent of the world’s population) live outside of their country of nationality. Consequently, almost half of them are in low- and middle-income countries and this report does provide framework to maximize the development impacts of migration, including how migration can help achieve the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

This report reveals the Local Economic Development method undertaken to produce the NDP III results. In 2006, LED was introduced to Uganda as the sixth objective of the Decentralization Policy as decentralization was failing to get the population out of poverty as envisaged during conceptualization in 1993. Efforts were constructed to fulfill it but a bold step was made in 2014 with the development of the LED policy.