Tony Blair has enlisted the support of Kofi Annan and Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates in a bid to put Africa back at the top of the international political agenda one year after Live8. The move comes ahead of a report this week which is expected to conclude that G8 leaders must do much better at delivering on the aid and trade pledges made at last year's Gleneagles summit.
Blair will make a speech on the Gleneagles commitments to a group of academics in London today, during which he will unveil the establishment of a high-level international panel aimed at ensuring that the world leaders keep their word -- a move that has long been advocated by Live8 campaigners.
No. 10 Downing Street sources said last night that Annan, the UN Secretary-General, had agreed to chair a new Africa Progress Panel. They said both Bob Geldof and the Nigerian President, Olusegun Obasanjo, would also be members of the group, which would be formally set up within weeks. Britain would ensure the initial funding, they said, but Gates's charitable foundation had agreed to help to fund it in the longer term.
Geldof is due to join fellow Live8 stars Annie Lennox and Youssou N'Dour later this week in releasing the first annual report on how promises made by last year's G8 summit are being kept. While it will note major progress in increasing aid to Africa, it is understood that it will highlight shortfalls in meeting a number of promises.
Although the debts of 20 of the world's poorest countries have been cancelled, the Gleneagles summit pledged to do so for nearly twice that number. Geldof is also expected to call for progress on ensuring the availability of Aids and malaria treatments, universal primary education, and on world trade talks.
"It is all about accountability, both to Africa and to G8 taxpayers in whose name these promises were made," said Oliver Buston, Europe director of Data, the advocacy group set up by Geldof, Bono and Bobby Shriver, a nephew of the late President John Kennedy, which produced the report.
Buston said it was part of a wider campaign to bring pressure on G8 leaders in the run-up to this year's summit, which will be hosted next month by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"When the G8 leaders step into the Palace of Congresses in St Petersburg, we want them ... to know that the world is watching to see whether they come up with the plans to meet the promises," he said.
He made it clear that one reason for the new sense of urgency was a concern, after a pre-summit meeting of the G8 finance ministers, that promises on health and education were being kicked into the long grass. "The G8's money men suffered a poverty of ambition," Data said after the meeting earlier this month.
It criticized ministers for failing to agree "time-bound targets" or firm financial commitments on "universal access to education and Aids treatment."
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