Development and Africa: Crucial Priorities for the G8
Fostering sustainable development and fighting poverty in the less advanced countries is a central priority on the G8 Heads of State and Government’s agenda. Numerous development initiatives have been launched and supported by the G8, first and foremost in favour of Africa. A world with less poverty and inequality is also a fairer, safer, stabler world.
Any solution to the problems of poverty and underdevelopment is closely bound up with the major international issues: peacekeeping, fighting terrorism, safeguarding the environment, responding to climate change, food security and migration. Indeed, the globalisation of the economy is creating opportunities for development, and threats to it as well. In an increasingly integrated world, the more advanced countries and the developing countries bear a joint responsibility for sharing these challenges and addressing them together. This calls for increasingly in-depth, constructive dialogue.
The last decade has seen very significant progress in terms of economic growth, a reduction in poverty and the spread of democracy, in Africa and many developing countries. Despite these steps forward, Africa remains the continent that has fallen furthest behind in meeting the Millennium Development Goals set by the United Nations in 2000 (war on poverty, hunger and malnutrition, disease, access to water and education, environmental safeguards), and where crisis situations still persist, with serious breaches of human rights. Much remains to be done to catch up and to consolidate the progress made to date, which is being jeopardised by the international economic crisis and by vulnerability to natural disasters and wars.
The G8 is taking up these challenges, both by imparting political thrust to concrete initiatives that contribute to development and peacekeeping and by fostering dialogue with the emerging economies and the developing countries with a view to managing globalisation responsibly.
Some of the best-known initiatives launched by the G8 are the health-related drives, such as the setting up of the Global Fund to Fight HIV-AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, of which Italy is one of the chief funders, by the 2001 Genoa Summit and the devising of innovative mechanisms for funding vaccine research and access to immunisation.
