Commission for Africa today launched its new report - Still Our Common Interest - which calls upon African leaders to step up efforts to convert unprecedented economic opportunities into poverty reduction and development. The new report, Still Our Common Interest, follows up on the previous report published in March 2005. It looks at what has happened [...]

In the final chapter, Making it Happen, the Commission for Africa’s report outlines what action must be taken to prevent its recommendations continuing the legacy of ‘yawning gulfs between commitments and delivery’ in Africa. The chapter argues that political will is key to Africa’s development and that international partners must now deliver on promises made by [...]

The Resources chapter of the Commission for Africa report looked at how the steps recommended in the rest of the report would be financed. The chapter is best known for its recommendation that international aid to Africa should be doubled. Without this expansion in aid, the report argued, Africa was unlikely to achieve the rapid [...]

Trade has been a key driver of growth in many developing countries over the last 50 years. But, as the More Trade and Fairer Trade chapter of the Commission for Africa report highlighted, Africa’s share of trade is very low and trade amongst African countries had stagnated in the preceding three decades. The report argued that [...]

“Africa is poor, ultimately, because its economy has not grown” argued the Commission for Africa. Going for Growth and Poverty Reduction, the fourth chapter of the Commission’s report, focused on how Africa can increase and sustain a higher economic growth rate and use this to reduce poverty.The Commission for Africa argued that a combination of [...]

The Commission for Africa’s chapter on ‘Investing in People‘ covered a wide range of topics relevant to development - health, education, HIV/AIDS, water, sanitation and help to the most vulnerable. The chapter called for external aid to all these areas to prioritise African countries’ own capacity to deliver effective basic services, such as health, education, [...]

The second chapter of the 2005 Commission for Africa report was on Peace and Security. It looked at what Africa and its partners could do to prevent violent conflict. Africa has suffered more than any other continent from the impact of violent conflict and insecurity. This has harmed growth and development. The report therefore identified [...]

In the first in a series of posts on the Commission for Africa’s various themes, this post summarises the original report’s recommendations on governance. The Commission for Africa argued that “effective states are the foundation of development” and that without effective governance, other reforms were unlikely to have their desired impact. It described an effective [...]

The Commission for Africa was relaunched at the World Economic Forum in Dar es Salaam in May 2010 to look at progress since the Commission published its original report in March 2010. The film of the launch is now available here.

A growing number of reports on progress against the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are being published in the build up to the UN’s MDG Review Summit in September. The headline that often emerges is that Africa is not on track to meet the targets - but a new report published today has challenged that view. [...]