One of Germany’s goals under its G20 Presidency is to achieve sustainable economic progress in Africa, particularly through infrastructure investment. A concrete, actionable deliverable could be for the G20 to help support Africa50 – a new Africa-owned and led infrastructure investment initiative – get off the ground.
The next EU-Africa summit is due to take place in Abidjan in November. This requires a vision of peaceful, legal partnership with and for each other. This can only be the creation of self-supporting economic development in Africa. Although development cooperation has a catalytic function here, private investments are decisive. In this case, it is advisable to ask oneself the following: which elements of mutual interest can and should we change? The EU’s Economic Partnership Agreements with African countries and country groups should be named in this context as an example.
Recently, it has become popular to question the relevance of “statistics” to make sense of the evolving nature of today’s world. A recent article in the Guardian claimed that “rather than diffusing controversy and polarisation, it seems as if statistics are actually stoking them”. The credibility of “official statistics” on GDP, poverty or migration flows gets questioned as they seem to not be in line with what citizens experience in their daily lives. Nor do they seem able to capture how large parts of the population “feel” about societal developments.
When they met in Hangzhou, China in September 2016, the G20 leaders launched the Initiative on Supporting Industrialisation in Africa and Least Developing Countries. It is certainly one on which Germany can build in the course of its own presidency in 2017. And hence, important that Germany sustain the momentum of this Initiative.
Das Zusammenspiel von Entwicklungspolitik, Militär und anderen Akteuren beim Krisenengagement in fragilen Staaten entwickelt sich positiv, das zeigt das Beispiel Mali. Dennoch ist eine Weiterentwicklung angeraten, die abgestimmtes und koordiniertes Planen und Handeln konsequent auf Krisenprävention ausrichtet. Dabei hat die Gemeinsamkeit Priorität. Das neue Weißbuch zur Sicherheitspolitik und zur Zukunft der Bundeswehr weist hierfür den Weg.
