Africa cooperation is a model for wider South-South cooperation that provides important opportunities for African development, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Wednesday.
The UN chief is in Beijing as a special guest to attend the three-day 2024 Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), which started on Wednesday in China’s capital.
In an exclusive interview with China Global Television Network (CGTN), he underscored the importance of solidarity between the people of China and Africa, particularly in the context of the lingering effects of colonialism on Africa’s development.
“It’s absolutely crucial. First of all, Africa is a continent that was a double victim of colonialism. First because of the impact of colonialism in itself, and second because as the global governance institutions the when the Breton Wood system were created after the World War II, most of the African countries were not yet existing. They were under colonial rules. And so Africa was not sufficiently represented in our global system, and this is particularly serious in the economic and financial dimensions,” Guterres said.
In light of these challenges, Guterres called for two key actions: the reform of the international financial system and the seizing of opportunities for South-South cooperation, with the China-Africa partnership as a prime example.
“We need to reform the international financial system to make it correspond to today’s economy and to properly benefit developing countries. Because the Chinese-African corporation is the symbol of the South-South corporation and because China is having an extremely important role in the investment that Africa needs to do to overcome its gaps in infrastructure, its gaps in education, and its gaps in health and the cooperation with China represents an extremely, extremely important opportunity for the African continent,” he said.
Guterres further noted that China-Africa cooperation not only helps address the development disparities facing Africa but also presents an important opportunity for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030.
“What we see is as China aligns its global development initiative with the sustainable development goals, the Chinese corporation, I’m sure, will be a very important instrument in supporting African countries exactly in the implementation of the Agenda 2030,” he said.
