World's rich failing on Africa promises- Bono
The world’s biggest industrial countries are failing to keep up with financial promises they
made to Africa, rock star Bono said today, calling a new progress report "a cold shower" for the Group of Eight.
G8 members in 2004/06 contributed less than half the amount needed to make good their promises to double Africa aid to 50 billion dollars (£25 billion) by 2010, according to a report released by Data ' Debt, Aids, Trade, Africa ' the Africa advocacy group founded by the 47-year-old lead singer of U2.
"The G8 are sleepwalking into a crisis of credibility. I know the Data report will feel like a cold shower, but I hope it will wake us all up," Bono said in Berlin.
Bono is urging German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who chairs a G8 summit in Germany next month, to ensure that members contribute what they said they would.
The report shows that the G8 increased aid by 2.3 billion dollars (£1.15 billion), but says they need to increase aid by an additional 3.1 billion dollars (£1.55 billion) to substantially help the people of Africa.
"These statistics are not just numbers on a page", Bono said. "They are people begging for their lives, for two pills a day, a mother begging to immunise her children, a child begging not to become a mother at the age of 12".
The Data report said that aid money that does arrive has an effect.
"Every day 1,450 Africans living with Aids are put on lifesaving drugs," the organisation said, and 20 million African children are going to school for the first time thanks in part to debt cancellations and aid increases.
Still, Bono warned that insufficient increases in aid could reverse progress already made. Data says the G8 must contribute 7.4 billion dollars (£3.7 billion) in 2007 alone to reach its goal. If Germany makes good on its promises to help Africa, he said, the other G8 members will do the same.
Britain and Japan have contributed most of the aid increase so far, it said.
Travelling later to European Union headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, Bono scolded France, Italy and other nations for using debt cancellation to mask cuts in regular aid payments to Africa.
"Debt cancellation has been used to hype the figures," he told reporters. "We don’t want those one-off payments to provide a smoke screen to actual drops in aid".
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso pledged to use his influence to lobby G8 members to meet aid commitments.
"As a European, I cannot accept that the great and the richest of the world do not respect the promises to the poorest of the world," he said.
