Economic Policy Management Training Programme of the University of Kinshasa (EPM Kinshasa)

The first three Economic Policy Management Programs (EPM) (Phase I) were approved by the Executive Board of the African Capacity Building Foundation in November 1996 with the overall goal to improve the performance of economic management ministries so as to enable them to successfully participate in the process of poverty reduction and were designed and implemented on the basis of the following three main assumptions/premises: (i) one of the main causes of the poor performance of African economies in the 1980s and 1990s was the insufficient/lack of qualified economic policy analysts and managers; (ii) this insufficient/lack of qualified economic policy analysts and managers was mostly due to the lack of institutional and human capacity in African countries’ tertiary institutions to train the required professionals; (iii); the institutional and human capacity incubated at McGill University and at the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches en Développement International (CERDI) at Auvergne University (France) since 1994 was to be transferred at selected African Partner’s Universities’ (APUs) Department of Economics and the latter would use it to train a critical number of the required economic policy analysts and managers for Africa.