PM's speech on Africa 7 October 2004

Africa will be 'in the spotlight of international attention' next year, the Prime Minister has said.

Mr Blair said that failure to deal with the continent's problems would be a disaster for Africa and for the wider world.

"The prize for success would be an Africa standing proud in its own right in the international community."

Read the Prime Minister's speech in full below:

Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen.  It is a tremendous pleasure to be here in Addis Ababa in the seat of the new African Union which is already showing its importance to building a peaceful and hopeful future for Africa.  And earlier today I was able to travel outside of the capital and to visit a project where, despite all the difficulties, people were making use of the help that was being given to them to try and create a new life for themselves. And it struck me once again so forcibly that in the end the poverty that people live in is not a poverty of their own spirit, or talent, or ability, it is a poverty that has been forced on them by the circumstances in which they live, and if we only change those circumstances, that spirit, and that talent, and that ability would shine through and create a better life for them, for their families and for their communities and for the world. And even if that help is small, it is so gratefully used and is such a powerful symbol of a different type of world.

I am also pleased to be here at the UN Economic Commission for Africa, which has been, if I can say so, so effectively led by K.Y. over the past 9 years, and K.Y. is also one of the members of the Commission for Africa and I would like to welcome the Commission members here.

Today I want to look ahead to a year when Africa will be in the spotlight of international attention, and I want to set out for you how I think that international attention can be turned into international action to help Africa beat poverty, and then conflict. 

Next year will be the year of decision for Africa and for the international community. The problems are multiple, we know them all - debt, disease, conflict, poor governance, inadequate aid. The difference is that this time we have to put together a plan that is comprehensive in its scope and has at its core a real partnership between Africa and the developed world.  The price of failure would be disaster for Africa and for the wider world. The prize for success would be an Africa standing proud in its own right in the international community. 

So Africa deserves this international attention, and the beginning of the 21st century is a time of unprecedented wealth and opportunity for the world. The European Union is enlarging to the east, restoring prosperity and political stability to those countries.  In south-east Asia we have seen incredible economic progress. The face of many parts of Latin America has been transformed, and today the world's two largest countries - China and India - are growing at as much as 9% a year, lifting over 20 million people out of poverty every year.

But when the United Nations meets next year to review progress towards the Millennium Development Goals, it will find that Africa as a continent has not enjoyed the progress which other parts of the world have seen. In Africa, most countries are still as poor as they were 40 years ago, and in some countries life expectancy, having improved for many years, has fallen back to what it was in the 1960s as a result of Aids.

This is wrong.  It is wrong that more than 1 in 6 African children die before their fifth birthday, it is wrong that only half of the lucky ones that survive are able to complete their primary education before they have to go out to work to support their family, and it is wrong that 12 million children in Africa have been made orphans by Aids.  It is wrong that somebody's chances in life depend so starkly, not on their talent, or ambitions, or how hard they work, but on where they are born. And those of us who believe that everyone, not just a few, everyone, should have the chance to fulfil their potential, cannot and must not stand by and watch Africa be left behind by the rest of the world.

I believe this.  More importantly, a huge proportion of people back in my own country - Britain - believe this.  It is why the British people give millions of pounds to charities working in Africa every year. But most people in other countries believe it too. That is why NGOs from all over the world, in Africa itself, in Europe, in Asia, in North and South America, are joining together to call on world leaders to "Make Poverty History". That must be our aim.

And so there is this immense and powerful moral cause, but there is a second reason why the rest of the world cannot stand by - because we cannot afford to, because what happens in Africa affects and will affect the rest of the world.  Millions of people in Africa, suffering from persecution, conflict, extreme poverty, even starvation, have had to leave their homes behind.  Most of these people don't have the resources or the ability to get very far and will probably become refugees in another poor country in Africa that cannot afford to protect them. But many do find their way to Europe and elsewhere. And we know that poverty and instability leads to weak states which can become havens for terrorists and other criminals. Even before 9/11 al Qaeda had bases in Africa, they still do, hiding in places where they can go undisturbed by weak governments, where they plan their next attack which could be anywhere in the world, including right here in Africa as we have seen.

So it is for these reasons, that, because it is morally right and because ultimately it must be in our own interest, it is clear that this spotlight of attention of the whole of the international community should be focused on Africa. That is why I have said that Africa will be one of the two priorities for the UK Presidency of the G8 in 2005, along with climate change. And I want to use our Presidency, and the interest that the G8 now has taken in Africa over many years, to turn this international attention into renewed international action to support Africa, and that is why we set up the Commission for Africa in May to help us achieve that. This Commission includes 17 men and women from government, business and civil society, from around Africa and the rest of the world.  Its job is to look at the evidence and to produce a comprehensive plan which will be published in early 2005 for how the international community can support African development in partnership together.

My colleagues on the Commission are meeting here to look at the evidence gathered so far and to agree on some early findings which we can start to help out with the experts - the people in Africa who live with this poverty day by day.  We will be looking at the evidence of what holds progress back in Africa - conflict, disease and often weak governance. But we will also be looking for the evidence of what has worked in Africa. We come back, as many people have, to Ethiopia 20 years after the imagination of the world, and the conscience of the world, were awakened by what happened.  It is easy to see the problems that remain, but we shouldn't either ignore the evidence of the progress that has been made here, progress that is due to the hard work, not just of the Ethiopian government but of the Ethiopian people.  Because we do know that Africa can make progress. At Independence in 1966, Botswana was one of the poorest countries in sub-Saharan Africa. It is now one of the richest. Average income has risen from a few hundred dollars to over $3,000 today. Economic growth has averaged 7.5% per year. And because of this progress Botswana is better placed to respond to one of the worst Aids epidemics in the world with one of the most advanced treatment programmes in Africa. For other countries the picture has been more mixed. For every step forward there has been a cruel push backwards, whether through disease or conflict, falling world prices for a major export or a failing government. But countries have also come back from these setbacks. UK military intervention in Sierra Leone helped to end a 10 year civil war in 2002. Just 2 years later the rebels have been disarmed, demobilised and reintegrated into civilian life, and just last month the UN peacekeepers handed over prime responsibility for security in the last remaining sector of the country to the government.

We also know that progress in Africa must be led by Africa.  If we look at history and learn the lessons, we can see that there is no single path to development. Different countries in Africa will develop differently. How they make progress, how they change and reform will depend on the different cultures and features of each country.  So the international community, donor countries and the development banks, must allow African countries the space to determine their own path to development, agreed amongst their own people. Countries should not be forced to sign up to policies which they do not believe will work, simply because a donor thinks it would be good for them.  And donors must be better at coordinating their efforts. We have learnt from our own experience in the UK that having myriad different budget lines, all with different conditions, can make it impossible for managers to use their own judgment to solve the problems they face on the ground, problems that can't be dealt with in the same way.  But likewise developing countries who have to meet different conditions from perhaps 20 or 30 different donors, and perhaps hundreds of NGOs, spend much of their time, too much, filling in forms for donors instead of getting on with the job.

This has already been done.  In Mozambique for example 14 donors and the
World Bank are supporting common policies, set by the government and agreed with donors. In return, donors provide more predictable and more co-ordinated support to the government's development plan, and everyone uses the same sets of results. This needs to become the norm, not the exception.

And African leadership is also vital at the continental level.

The African Union is already showing how important it will be, particularly on governance and security issues.  The African Union's new plan for Africa's development, and its Africa peer review mechanism, is indeed an African-led initiative to get African countries to encourage each other to improve governance, which the evidence shows is a vital component of progress.  23 countries, covering 75% of the population of sub-Saharan Africa, have now signed up for peer reviews.  I strongly welcome this African-led approach to improving demonstrably the governance of countries, and believe the G8 should provide resources to support implementation of peer review recommendations.  The African Union's Peace and Security Council, set up on Africa Day this year, is also a crucial step forward.  I applaud the African Union's decision to establish a standby force with a rapid reaction capability to deal with conflicts and peacekeeping in Africa. The first of five brigades will be operational by the end of the year, and the G8 is already supporting the development of this standby force.

I have just been to Sudan, where an appalling humanitarian disaster is happening, with thousands of people dying every month as a result of disease, malnutrition and violence.  I set out the necessary action yesterday and look forward to it being implemented.

But the African Union is playing an absolutely vital lead role in trying to resolve this crisis, both by bringing the government and the rebels together to try to resolve the conflict peacefully, and meanwhile monitoring that all sides are observing their interim cease-fire agreement.  I should say to you that the UK and EU are also ready to assist the AU to expand this mission urgently. We have already provided some $15 million to the first AU mission in Darfur.  We must increase this to at least $150 million and the UK will do its part, providing another $20 million to the AU mission.  The European Union is also ready to provide planning, logistics and policing expertise to assist the African Union in mounting this huge but vital undertaking.

So armed with the evidence from the Commission for Africa about what Africa needs and what has held back progress in the past, the purpose of next year has got to be to turn international attention on Africa into international action to support Africa.  With the publication of this report early next year, the time for excuses will be over, the world inside Africa and outside Africa will know not just what the problems are, but also the solutions. 

So next year is the year of decision for Africa and for us to have the political will to confront the challenge of Africa, and the political will to overcome it together.  And there are already some things which it is clear that the international community must do. I would like to set out four:  two things which will stop progress being set back, two things which we must do to accelerate progress.  Two of the biggest threats to progress in Africa are disease and conflict.  If we do not tackle HIV-AIDS, there is no way the poorest countries in the world are going to escape poverty. AIDS is already undoing much of the progress that has been made in combating poverty in Africa in the last 20 years. In June this year Britain announced that it would provide at least £1.5 billion over the next three years to help combat HIV-AIDS in developing countries, especially Africa.  As part of this, we have pledged to double our support for the global fund for AIDS, TB and malaria to over £150 million, and other countries are also providing huge sums to tackle AIDS. So we must strengthen the role of UNAIDS as the key body that can properly co-ordinate all of the public and private donors now fighting AIDS. We must ensure that in our urgency to tackle this disease we do not overwhelm thinly stretched African governments with the multiplicity of different plans for tackling AIDS.  Malawi is leading the way in implementing the three "ones" approach, that means that a country should have one strategy for dealing with AIDS, one agency to co-ordinate donor assistance to implement this plan, and one system for monitoring progress. G8 and other donors must work with UNAIDS to ensure that this happens everywhere. 

Then conflict has all too often set back progress in African countries. As I have said throughout the speech, the international community should be supporting Africa's own solutions to its problems, as indeed we are trying to do in Sudan. The UK intends to train directly or indirectly nearly 20,000 African troops over the next 5 years.  This includes planners and logistics staff to strengthen AU capacity to mount peacekeeping operations across the continent. But there will be times when Africa cannot stop conflict on its own. Then the rest of the international community must stand ready to help. That is why I also want Africa to be the top priority for the European Union's new rapidly deployable battle groups and to get them operational as soon as possible in 2005. These battle groups would allow the European Union to respond to a crisis in Africa within 10 days to deal with problems immediately, so giving time for the AU or the UN to prepare a longer term intervention. 

If we can help Africa to stop progress being undone by disease and conflict, Africa's people will ensure that Africa grows. But in order to achieve the Millennium Development Goals in Africa by 2015, progress as we know needs to be so much faster. This requires additional resources from the public and the private sector.  International action has to make this happen.  In order to provide the additional $50 billion which the UN says is required to meet the Millennium Development Goals, we need donor countries to increase aid and debt relief, to frontload it and to direct more of it to the poorest countries which need it in Africa.

Again in the UK we have tried to show what can be done. We have more than doubled our aid budget since 1997.  We wish to continue increasing aid at this rate, which would mean that the UK would reach the 0.7% UN target in 2013. As a result of this, we will be able to increase aid directly for Africa to £1 billion next year.  This will enable us to lift one million people in Africa permanently out of income poverty each year.  27 countries are already benefiting from debt relief under the HIPC initiative. In July this year Ghana became the 14th country to reach Completion Point. As a result Ghana will receive $3.5 billion in debt relief, and Ghana could save approximately $230 million annually in debt service costs for the next 10 years, which is money that instead it can spend on education and health and other investments for its people. 

But we need to go further. We are calling for a revaluation of IMF gold to wipe out the debt owed by poor countries to the IMF, and we have said that we will pay our share of the debt owed to the World Bank and the African Development Bank by the poorest countries until a final settlement is reached. And we must tackle the unsustainable debt of other poor countries, not part of HIPC, like Nigeria. The UK will therefore lead efforts in the Paris Club to provide debt relief to these countries to get them to a level of debt which IMF analysis shows they can afford. And we have also, from the UK, proposed a new International Financing Facility so that we frontload these resources so they can be invested in Africa's future now.

However, aid alone is not the answer. We also need to increase private sector investment in Africa, we need action to open up opportunities for business in Africa to grow faster by trading with the rest of the world. There could be no clearer example that what is good for Africa is actually good for the rest of the world. We would all benefit from fairer trade, all of us.  I welcome the progress made in the WTO negotiations in Geneva in July, in particular the agreement by other G8 countries to match the EU commitment to phase out all export subsidies on agricultural goods, which make it so much harder for Africa to compete with subsidised goods from richer countries. West African cotton farmers alone could earn some $250 million from this. The UK would like to see Africa get the benefit of this agreement as soon as possible. But actually we should not wait for the WTO to increase the opportunities for Africa to trade, we can increase those opportunities now. For example once Lesotho was allowed to import cotton from China to turn it into clothing, which is then sold to America, business boomed, it increased from less than $100 million to over $300 million in three years. The EU and the G8 must encourage such collaboration between developing countries to help them trade out of poverty.

So these are things which the international community, the G8, the EU and elsewhere, can do to support Africa and should do.  And I look forward to discussing these and many other ideas with my Commission for Africa colleagues later today.

The strongest reflection I had when I visited the village in the countryside earlier today was a reflection about how we mobilise support across the world to make next year a true year of decision for Africa and make that decision the right one for Africa and the broader world. What is so frustrating about the present situation is that we do actually know in our heart of hearts what works. We in our Commission are going to put forward proposals and plans that we hope we can get agreed by the international community, and along the way I don't doubt there will be things that we do and say that provide some fresh and new insight. But actually you only need to visit any part of Africa today and the insights are laid bare and very clear. There are people who have every bit as much talent as any of the wealthiest people in any part of the developed world, in any part of Britain, America, Europe, Japan, any other part of the wealthy world.  And yet as a result of history, as a result of a huge complexity of problems that have beset Africa over many decades, some of which we needn't even go back into, painful as it is for all of us, as a result of these problems, these people with all this talent and ability can't make their lives work. And every time, in no matter how small a way they are given the chance of a better future, they take it. And therefore what is uplifting about seeing real people given the help and using it is that we know, given that help, they can make the progress that they want. But what makes me angry and frustrated is that we who have so much wealth, and who have the opportunity and so often take it for granted, if we were prepared to make a real commitment to Africa, we could change the circumstances in which people live so that everyone here got that hope of a better and different future. And the purpose of what we are trying to do is to say forget this being about wealthy countries giving out of the generosity of their hearts to African countries. What this is actually about is recognising the common bond of humanity that says if we together help resolve the problems that beset this continent - disease, which we know we can prevent and deal with;  conflict, which we know we could resolve;  debt and aid, which we know we can afford;  good governance, which we know it is within the capability of Africa to provide - if we came together, work together and took that comprehensive plan and actually decided we would make it the priority for the international community to implement, then those people that I saw this morning, who are, I know, when the television cameras are there and the photographers are there, are the exception in terms of the help they are given, those people would become the norm, their prospects of a better future would become the rule. That is all it requires. 

So we embark on this great process to build up to the G8 decision making process next year, knowing what needs to be done, knowing that if we do it we have willing partners here in Africa desperate for the opportunity to make something of their lives, and knowing therefore that the only thing that stands between them and us, between success and failure, is the absence of political will. And in all the things that I deal with in politics, and the things that make people cynical and disengage from the political process, when I come and see what is happening here and see what could happen, I know that however difficult politics is, there is at least one noble cause worth fighting for, and it is here, on this continent, and it is here we can determine its future, me and you together as partners, not as somebody who is giving something to somebody else, but two groups of human beings recognising what they have in common and what they could share in common.  So that is what this is about, it is about far more than individual speeches and individual reports, it is about deciding whether that line of progress that humanity in the end - because I am an optimist - always follows, whether just for once it could be speeded up, the obstacles overcome, the future laid out for us and driven forward with real ambition and real hope.