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African finance ministers meet in Nigeria to fight poverty and AIDS

ABUJA: African officials said on Saturday the continent was unlikely to meet ambitious targets to halve poverty and boost health and education over the next ten years, as finance ministers from across Africa gathered in the Nigerian capital.

The 20 African ministers, who will be joined by another 15 over the weekend, are meeting for an annual, two-day assembly of the United Nations’ Economic Commission for Africa. The commission has said the ministers will focus on “reasons for the sluggish pace” in meeting a string of Millennium Development Goals set by the UN General Assembly five years ago — including halving poverty and radically boosting the fight against HIV/AIDS by 2015.

In an opening address, Nigerian Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said recent reports showed “the Millennium Development Goals will largely not be met by 2015 in our region.” She added: “This is depressing.”

Maxwell Mkwezalamba, a Malawian official from the continent-wide African Union, told delegates “many of our African countries are unlikely to achieve” the goals, noting extreme poverty has been on the increase since the 1990s.

Delegates called on developed nations to sharply increase financial aid to the impoverished continent and forgive billions of dollars (euros) in debt, echoing a British government-backed report earlier this year.

Chaired by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Commission for Africa report calls on the international community to immediately double foreign aid to Africa to $50 billion a year and sets a goal of complete debt cancellation.

A doubling of foreign aid “would be the minimum required” to meet the UN targets, said Nkonjo-Iweala. “Much more needs to be done, and it needs to be done more quickly,” she said.

This weekend’s meeting is being held in the run-up to a July summit of the G-8 group of wealthy nations in Gleneagles, Scotland, where Blair hopes his report’s recommendations will be adopted.

Britain has won the backing of France, Germany and Italy for establishing an International Finance Facility, which would leverage billions of dollars a year for aid to Africa by issuing bonds on the world’s capital markets. However, the US and Japan have rejected the proposal. ap

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