30 May 2007

As Tony Blair begins a five-day tour of Africa ahead of the G8 summit, a report by the international anti-poverty charity ActionAid shows that Africa is still waiting for billions of dollars of aid promised at the Gleneagles summit in 2005. Many aspects of Africa’s development are affected, but one immediate consequence is that Aids continues to take 6000 African lives every day.

At Gleneagles, Mr Blair chaired a summit where the G8 leaders promised poor countries a $50bn boost in annual aid budgets by 2010. The UK duly raised its aid by 20% in the first year, but ActionAid says other G8 countries have performed less well.

"Thanks to the G8’s patchy response the state of Africa is still as Tony Blair described it in 2001, a scar on the conscience of the world," the report’s author Tom Sharman said. "Britain under Blair made a good start towards delivering the full Gleneagles package, but failed to bring the other G8 countries along."

France, Italy and - embarrassingly for the G8 president Angela Merkel - Germany are the countries chiefly responsible for an $8bn aid gap identified in ActionAid’s report. In order to increase aid steadily towards the 2010 targets, G8 donors would need to have provided $64.4bn in aid in 2006. But once debt relief is stripped out, the real figure was only $56.5 bn.

The G8's slowness in mobilising promised aid is costing lives, according to Aditi Sharma, head of ActionAid’s HIV and Aids campaign. She said, "Two years ago, the G8 pledged to step up the fight against Aids. Since then Aids has killed nearly six million adults and children – close to the population of London."

To deliver on 2005 commitments, ActionAid urges G8 leaders to agree on:

• Annual targets to deliver on the 2005 promise of an extra $50 billion in aid per year by 2010.
• A funding plan to deliver the extra $8-10 billion that will be needed each year to reverse the HIV and Aids pandemic; and a recognition that violence against women and girls is a key cause of the spread of HIV

In addition ActionAid is calling for:

• Action to ensure that G8-based companies are held accountable for their activities overseas.
• Action to cut G8 carbon emissions, and next steps to agreement on a post-2012 international agreement ensuring that poor countries get the technology and resources they need to adapt to climate change.

Download the report at www.actionaid.org.uk/doc_lib/g8report_merkels_moment.pdf