Blair sets up new Africa group
Tony Blair today set up a new group, chaired by UN secretary general Koffi Annan, to report on progress in tackling poverty in Africa.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates will help fund the group, whose members are also set to include anti-poverty campaigner Bob Geldof, Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo and Peter Eigen, founder of Transparency International.
The launch of the group comes one year on from the pledges made at the G8 summit in Gleneagles for an extra £27.5 billion a year in aid to developing countries by 2010 and a cancellation of debt in the world’s poorest countries.
Mr Blair warned that these issues could easily slip down the agenda again, and vowed to do everything to ensure they do not.
The Africa Progress Panel, as the group will be known, will be charged with producing an annual report for the G8, UN and Africa Partnership Forum.
It will attempt to “maintain the international profile of Africa achieved in 2005”, Mr Blair told an audience at Kings College London this evening.
“Just because these issues are at the top of the agenda now, it doesn’t mean they couldn’t easily slip down again,” he said.
Mr Blair revealed that the government would shortly be publishing a white paper on eliminating world poverty that would set out what needed to be done to ensure the pledges of Gleneagles are delivered.
He also announced a doubling of the Department for International Development’s (Dfid) budget for education in developing countries from £450 million last year to more than £1 billion by 2010.
However, the new group has been dismissed as just another panel by the World Development Movement, which was part of last year’s Make Poverty History campaign.
A spokesman told politics.co.uk: “The idea that somehow a panel of the great and the good will make [Tony Blair] or other world leaders deliver on their promises is entirely bizarre.”
Earlier, international development secretary Hilary Benn said much had been achieved in the year since Gleneagles and the series of Live8 concerts, designed to put pressure on world leaders to act, that preceded it.
He said the panel, which was a recommendation of the Commission for Africa, was about ensuring Africa did not slip off the agenda.
“I think it is about keeping up the pressure because we wouldn’t have achieved at Gleneagles last year what was agreed by the G8 if it hadn’t have been for the extraordinary tide of human will,” he told BBC One’s Breakfast programme.
“And the purpose of the panel, which the prime minister has set up, is an independent body to report on what we are doing and if we are not keeping to our promises to draw that to the attention of the public.”
