Africa in the mix: The G20, Africa and the UN

Africa in the mix: The G20, Africa and the U.N

Pho­tos: MCC, the U.N and G20.org

This week, lead­ers from around the world began gath­er­ing in New York for the annu­al Unit­ed Nations Gen­er­al Assem­bly meet­ing. This gath­er­ing, now rou­tine for the U.N., has been tak­ing place since 1945 when the U.N was founded.

It has been 64 years since the cat­a­stroph­ic events of the sec­ond World War(WWII) gave birth of this peace move­ment called the Unit­ed Nations.

In anoth­er news, African-born Daniel Yohannes was nom­i­nat­ed by Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma to be the CEO of the Mil­len­ni­um Chal­lenge Cor­po­ra­tion (MCC).

The MCC over­seas the Mil­len­ni­um Chal­lenge Account, a bilat­er­al devel­op­ment fund cre­at­ed by the Bush admin­is­tra­tion in 2004. The Fund, work­ing through a Com­pact Agree­ment, dis­burs­es devel­op­ment resources, with account­abil­i­ty, to both rich and poor nations. A lot of the coun­tries that have ben­e­fit­ed from the MCA are from Africa. Many of these coun­tries are now clas­si­fied as Heav­i­ly Indebt­ed Poor Coun­tries (HIPC).

For the G20, an amal­ga­ma­tion of twen­ty indus­tri­al­ized nations, with the aim of strength­en­ing the world’s finan­cial sys­tems and fos­ter­ing sus­tain­able eco­nom­ic growth and devel­op­ment, the Sep­tem­ber 20 meet­ing in Pitts­burg, comes at a cru­cial time. It is a cru­cial time for the finan­cial indus­try around the world that came close to col­laps­ing under the weight of a mort­gage cri­sis, the cas­cad­ing effects of job loss­es, mount­ing per­son­al and cor­po­rate debt.