A dust cloud blew across the market of the Abu Chok refugee camp in Darfur as Ahmed Abdullah Ibrahim summed up his desperate situation. "It is unsafe for me to go back home and it's not safe here," he said, his face wrapped up against the desert winds in a white headscarf. "Even yesterday, we had people in the camp come to attack us. They came in and fired shots."
The cost of conflict on African development was approximately $300bn between 1990 and 2005, according to new research by Oxfam International, IANSA and Saferworld. This is equal to the amount of money received in international aid during the same period.
The answer to the question that is being posed today – “Can a common African future be built on the strengths of a diverse continent” -- is yes. The broader question however is: how can one match the vision of African development, integration, peace, and democratic governance with institutions that have the capacity to develop and implement policies to work towards the concrete implementation of the vision?
Kofi Annan has just agreed to head the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.
“Robert Zoellick, who has been nominated to become the president of the World Bank, said that he would make Africa his top priority”, The International Herald Tribune recently reported. “Clearly, there needs to be a big focus on Africa”, Zoellick said in an interview. “This isn’t new.”(1)
If they want to have any claim of humanitarian concern for the world’s poor, the G8 leaders meeting this week in Germany should not ignore the plight of the 60 million people in Democratic Republic of the Congo.
