What Is G8 Africa?
G8 Africa is a process of dialogue between the African countries and the G8, designed to strengthen and promote relations with Africa and to further the continent's social and economic development.
With their pledge to endow the Partnership With Africa with formal institutional dignity, the G8 leaders' aimed to place the African continent firmly on their international agenda's list of priorities. The premise for this new focus was the awareness that Africa has been deprived of the international community's much-needed attention for far too long. It was a way of recognizing the inadequacies of the past. African Heads of State and Government leaders (Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa) were invited to the G8 Summit for the very first time in 2001 to present their New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) project. On that occasion the African leaders reaffirmed the importance of their initiative for promoting development, based on adopting an independent approach to handling problems, on sharing responsibility, and on cooperating with the G8.
The NEPAD's founding principles reaffirm:
- the will of the continent's peoples to redeem and to reappropriate their own future (ownership);
- the fact that a sharing of responsibility highlights, on the one hand, the African countries' commitment to improving their own ability to govern and, on the other, the G8 countries' commitment to guaranteeing more and better aid to the African continent, also by starting to seriously address and enact debt cancellation and by lifting tariff and other barriers that hinder the access of African produce to the international markets (mutual responsibility);
- the fact that the new Partnership between the G8 and Africa is designed to underscore the leading industrially advanced democracies' political will to broaden and deepen their relations with the African countries, both by backing Africa's efforts to address crucial development issues, and by closely cooperating with the pan-African institutions on peacekeeping, on consolidating democratic institutions on the continent, and on promoting economic and social development (partnership).
The mutual nature of the commitments is a choice to which there is no alternative today, a choice that is farsighted in that it translates into a concrete proposal based on a clear sharing of responsibiliy between the leading industrially advanced democracies and the countries on the African continent.
The historic dialogue between Africa and the leading industrially advanced democracies, which first got under way under Italy's G8 presidency at the summit in Genoa in 2001, has continued to be pursued at all subsequent G8 summits, with the leaders welcoming and showing their support for the proposals illustrated by the African countries by drafting the G8's African Action Plan (AAP), and by institutionalizing the role of the G8 countries' personal representative for the African countries on a permanent basis.
This section of the website is devoted to exploring in greater depth the path that led to G8 Africa's establishment, the development of the G8 Africa process, and the goals that the Italian presidency has set itself in its determination to continue to strengthen the process.
