EU-AFRICA MINISTERIAL - FOLLOW UP TO CAIRO SUMMIT

EU and Africa ministers met on 11 October, in a follow up to the first ever EU-Africa Summit held in Cairo last year. The meeting on 11 October was preceded by a meeting on 10 October between a number of African Heads of State (South Africa, Senegal, Egypt and Zambia) on the one hand, and the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Belgium, representing the Belgian Presidency of the EU, and the EU Council Secretary General, on the other.
The aim of the meeting with the heads of state was to discuss the ‘New Africa Initiative’ a political commitment from African leaders, based on a common vision of poverty eradication, growth and sustainable development. The EU will report on this exchange of views at the next G8 meeting in Canada in 2002.
The actual EU-Africa ministerial meeting, which was co-chaired by Belgian Foreign Minister, Louis Michel, and his counterpart from Zambia, tackled the state of progress made in implementing the Cairo Declaration and Action Plan adopted at the EU-Africa Summit in Cairo in the 8 priority areas: conflict prevention, regional integration, the environment; HIV/AIDS, food security, human rights and democracy, restitution of stolen cultural goods, and debt alleviation.
Last year’s Africa-EU Summit was shadowed by a parallel meeting of African and European civil society actors in Lisbon. Eurostep, which participated in that meeting, has been involved in facilitating African and European civil society engagement in the process of Africa-EU co-operation, and pushing for links between this process and ACP-EU Co-operation. At the Cairo Summit a delegation of African and European civil society presented the Heads of States with a civil society action plan on Africa-EU co-operation, which was apparently well received. It thus disappointing that in the follow up actions to the Summit, neither the EU nor African governments have made attempts to engage with or refer to civil society. This is spite of the commitment to involve civil society in the development of cooperation strategies agreed by the EU and almost all African Governments under the Cotonou Agreement.