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In this its 30th year of existence, the leaders of the G8 nations will meet in Gleneagles, Scotland from 6-8 July under the presidency of the UK. The G8 gathers together the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the UK, and the USA along with representation from the EU by President Barroso. At these annual meetings, these actors have the opportunity to discuss major issues of the day and informally commit their governments to working in co-operation with the other G8 members in order to achieve global goals more effectively. Past G8 meetings have yielded some progressive results. Africa is at the top of this years agenda set by the UK. At the 2002 Kananaskis Summit, the G8 agreed an ‘Africa Action Plan’ (AAP), a response to the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD, initiated by a small group of African leaders and later endorsed by the African Union. Through the AAP, the G8 identified eight areas for action ranging from strengthening institutions and governance, implementing debt relief, fostering trade, investment, economic growth and sustainable development, to improving health and confronting HIV/AIDS, and improving water resource management. Since 2002 these promises have been renewed and built upon at successive meetings in Evian 2003 and Sea Island 2004. During the Sea Island Summit, commitments to the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) were reconsolidated and extended, providing some $100 billion of debt relief for 37 of the worlds poorest countries of which African countries comprise the vast majority. Despite all these commitments and those made at the UN in 2000 in the form of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), Africa remains a deprived continent, in political, economic and social terms. Sub-Saharan Africa is ravaged by extreme poverty, and paralysed by HIV/AIDS. Its share of world trade halved between 1980 and 2002, whilst more than 13 million men, women and children have died from AIDS, with 26 million more presently living with the virus. The ‘Commission for Africa Report’ published in March 2005 called for Africa to receive “ a comprehensive ‘big push’ on many fronts at once” in order to tackle the interlocking problems which Africa faces. The number one recommendation of the Africa Commission is the strengthening of governance and capacity-building for “ without progress in governance, all other reforms will have limited impact.” Thus, the time is now upon us for the G8 nations, along with the EU to give that urgent push immediately in order to alleviate the abominable suffering which scars Africa everyday. The 2001 COMECE Global Governance Report recommends the establishing of a Global Governance Group made up of heads of state and government to deal “ with horizontal matters on the global level and assure a minimum of co-ordination and coherence in the system.” In the absence of such a group, the weight of this responsibility thus falls to the G8. Theirs is an opportunity to make poverty history.
