What does the African Union bring to the G20 Group

With full G20 membership, the AU can represent a continent that’s home to the world’s largest free trade area. It’s also enormously rich in the resources the world needs to combat climate change, which Africa contributes to the least but is affected by the most.

The African continent has 60% of the world’s renewable energy assets and more than 30% of the minerals key to renewable and low-carbon technologies. Congo alone has almost half of the world’s cobalt, a metal essential for lithium-ion batteries, according to a United Nations report on Africa’s economic development released last month.

African leaders are tired of watching outsiders take the continent’s resources for processing and profits elsewhere and want more industrial development closer to home to benefit their economies.

Take Africa’s natural assets into account and the continent is immensely wealthy, Kenyan President William Ruto said at the first Africa Climate Summit this week. The gathering in Nairobi ended with a call for fairer treatment by financial institutions, the delivery of rich countries’ long-promised $100 billion a year in climate financing for developing nations and a global tax on fossil fuels.

Finding a common position among the AU’s member states, from the economic powers of Nigeria and Ethiopia to some of the world’s poorest nations, can be a challenge. And the AU itself has long been urged by some Africans to be more forceful in its responses to coups and other crises.

The body’s rotating chairmanship, which changes annually, also gets in the way of consistency, but Africa “will need to speak with one voice if it hopes to influence G20 decision-making,” Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, a former prime minister of Niger, and Daouda Sembene, a former executive director of the International Monetary Fund, wrote in Project Syndicate this year.

African leaders have shown their willingness to take such collective action. During the Covid-19 pandemic, they united in loudly criticizing the hoarding of vaccines by rich countries and teamed up to pursue bulk purchases of supplies for the continent.

Now, as a high-profile G20 member, Africa’s demands will be harder to ignore.bit quam, officatur raepuditiis soluptas voluptibus dendanto int eictur, sequae net ulloribusae sit, to estota quo dolorem comnimus.