Pan- African Conference on Illicit Financial Flows (IFFs)

Africa has some of the fastest growing economies in the world; however the continent still has to deal with deep inequality issues at the same time.

 Additionally, Africa needs to embark on deliberate and concrete reforms to capture currently unexplored or poorly managed resources. Central to this is curtailing IFFs and transforming these funds into a powerful tool for enhancing domestic resource mobilization to spur the continent’s development. Undoubtedly, tax is the most reliable and sustainable source of mobilizing domestic revenue to finance development particularly for poor developing countries.

One area for focus is the extensive tax avoidance across the board on the part of transnational corporations by means of legal loopholes and a lack of international coordination.

Africa as a continent is attempting to tackle issues pertaining to Illicit Financial Flows (IFFs) and taxation of TNCs. A significant step forward was the establishment of the High Level Panel on IFFs (HLP) in 2012 followed by the launching of the HLP recommendations in 2015. This has enabled UNECA, AU, TJN-A and other African civil societies to set up a consortium to help implement the HLP recommendations.

The tax justice movement has been largely led by Western countries working towards tackling the above issues. However, there is dire need to have these global conversations informed by African perspectives.

As a result, TJN-A and FES seeks to create a reference group to provide strategic advice and direction with regard to policy interventions on tax and international financial architecture from an African perspective. This would entail the group acting as a sounding board and to some extent a co-creator of knowledge that can be used in the greater policy and advocacy domain. The expert group would ultimately provide direction for an African lead in the intellectual discourse of efforts to reform global finance.

The program can be downloaded here

The concept note can be downloaded here