German Chancellor Angela Merkel yesterday hosted African leaders for a G20 conference aimed at fighting the grinding poverty driving the mass migrant influx to Europe.
The idea was to team up African nations willing to reform with the world’s biggest economies and private investors to bring business and jobs to a continent where instability and corruption often scare off foreign companies.
“The global community has an interest in the better economic development of Africa,” German Minister of Finance Wolfgang Schaeuble said.
Photo: Reuters
Merkel hosted the initiative as part of Germany’s presidency of the G20, whose leaders meet in the northern port of Hamburg next month.
Invited to Berlin were the leaders of Egypt, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal and Tunisia, as well as the heads of the World Bank, IMF and African Union.
In Africa — whose population is set to double by mid-century — economies need to grow equally fast “and promise a future for young people, which would also help to ease migratory pressures,” Merkel’s spokeswoman Ulrike Demmer said.
Germany, Europe’s largest economy, has taken in more than 1 million asylum seekers since 2015 — more than half from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, but also many thousands from Ethiopia, Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa.
Hundreds of thousands more have trekked through the Sahara into Libya, hoping that traffickers there will take them in rickety boats across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe.
IMF managing director Christine Lagarde said that “having people flee from many sub-Saharan countries to reach better shores is not a sustainable response.”
“Creating the economic circumstances where people can live, grow, be educated and create value for themselves and their families at home is the way to go,” she told business daily Handelsblatt.
Merkel last year visited major migration transit countries Mali and Niger as well as Ethiopia, the seat of the African Union, and pledged 27 million euros (US$30 million) in aid aiming to stop migrants heading for Europe in the first place.
“The well-being of Africa is in Germany’s interest,” Merkel said at the time.
Critics have dismissed the latest multilateral Africa initiative as a half-hearted effort without a major aid commitment, but organizers said it could help boost prosperity and reduce the mass flight and brain drain, especially of young people.
Under the G20 “compacts” plan, an initial seven African nations will pledge reforms to attract more private sector investment.
Those countries will then receive technical support from the IMF, World Bank, other institutions and their G20 partner country, which will also promote the effort to its own industrial sectors.
More than 100 banks and other potential investors were expected to attend the two-day conference.
“This is not about hand-outs or just money or cheap money, but about the opportunity to attract investment, profits and jobs,” a German finance ministry official said.
Germany will team up with Ghana, Ivory Coast and Tunisia, while other G20 members will support efforts by Ethiopia, Morocco, Rwanda and Senegal.
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