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IMF Africa regional office

13 November, 2008

 The Africa Office is the oldest regional office within the IMF and was established during the period of the mergers of the major metal unions in South Africa at that time. Numsa, the IMF's largest affiliate in the region, is a result of the merger. The office was created in the pre-democracy years where the struggle for worker rights in South Africa was experiencing its most volatile era through major protests, strikes and other desperate industrial actions.

The regional office has 28 affiliates with a total membership amounting to over 320 000 members. The region is divided into four sub-regions: East, West, North and Southern Africa. The two most active sub-regions are East and Southern Africa with West Africa struggling to alleviate some of its internal problems and the IMF Head Office sharing most of the responsibility for North Africa because of language and geographical dynamics.

The regional office concentrates on union building, education and equal rights as part of its core activities in line with the IMF Action Programme. In addition, the office encourages mergers of small unions in order to facilitate growth and development of bigger, more powerful unions, as well as encouraging solidarity among workers through this process. Furthermore, the regional office has assisted affiliates with collective bargaining and organising campaigns as well as campaigns to highlight the poor effects of precarious work.

The regional office faces many challenges on a regular basis that sometimes acts as impediments to real progress in the region. Due to the lack of large manufacturing bases in Africa, there are very small metal unions on the continent. This has thus highlighted the need to develop more general unions and to create space for different merges to take place.

Another severe challenge is that of HIV/AIDS: Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest incidence of HIV/AIDS in the world and whose direct impact is to kill off communities and the workforce in many countries. HIV/AIDS is a severe threat to livelihoods of families through deaths of bread-winners and therefore education and training around HIV/AIDS needs to be done on a continuous basis.

Women continue to pose a further challenge for unions on the continent. Women remain in the background of union decision-making bodies are therefore marginalized on a regular basis. Leadership on the continent continue to downplay the valuable role that women bring to the labour movement and therefore are not opening up and creating adequate space for women to operate and lead within unions.

The economic and political landscape in Africa is often unstable with high inflation rates, food insecurity and rising energy and fuel prices being the order of the day. This inevitably does not easily facilitate sound democracy and good governance from governments. The problem is compounded with high levels of poverty, unemployment, HIV/AIDS and a general economic meltdown of essential social services in almost all affiliated countries.

Thus, the environment in which the office operates has many challenges, but we continue to endeavour towards building strong, effective unions that can tackle many of the challenges listed above.

The regional office produces a quarterly newsletter, UMOJA, as well as assists affiliates in the region to develop educational and training materials.