Rich nations under pressure to honour G8 pledge to Africa

One of the most powerful lobby groups ever assembled will gather in Berlin this week to press the German chancellor, Angela Merkel - the current chair of the rich nations club, the G8 - to ensure that it keeps the promise it made to double aid to the world's poor.

The lobbyists are each the most respected figures in their field. At their head is the man who was until recently the world's most senior diplomat, Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the United Nations. At his side will be Robert Rubin, who heads the world's largest company, the American banking giant Citigroup, and who was twice US Treasury Secretary in the Clinton era. Other members include the Live8 mastermind, Bob Geldof, and Graca Machel, the wife of Nelson Mandela.

The group, which goes under the unglamorous name of the Africa Progress Panel, is being funded by the world's richest man, Bill Gates. It has been set up to police the promises made by the G8 at Gleneagles two years ago to double aid to Africa by 2010. The latest aid figures show that most rich nations are going back on those promises to an alarming extent.

The new panel had its first meeting, behind closed doors, in Geneva last week. Its members included the world's top anti-corruption campaigner, Peter Eigen, head of Transparency International, and Muhammad Yunus, who won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for starting the Grameen Bank, which makes loans to the world's poorest people. Also present was the outgoing president of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo. Tony Blair is expected to join the panel as soon as he stands down as Prime Minister.

The group settled upon a very different approach from previous initiatives. Rather than add to the pile of major dust-gathering reports on Africa, it will issue short, sharp bulletins monitoring failures to deliver - and pointing to the specific consequences they will have.

Already there is much that ought to concern them. Gleneagles promised two main things. The first - writing off almost $40m (£20m) in debts - has been done, releasing large amounts of cash for African governments to spend on making health care and education better available. All the evidence is that such spending is, thanks to a closer scrutiny on African governments, being better targeted than ever before.

But the second promise - doubling aid to Africa by 2010 - is well behind target. Global aid actually fell 2.7 per cent last year, and is set to fall again this year. Aid to Africa increased by only 2 per cent, though that figure rises to 9 per cent if donations through institutions like the World Bank are included. "The figures are scandalous," said Jamie Drummond, head of Geldof's lobby group Data (Debt Aids Trade Africa). "This is insufficient progress on the G8 promises to end extreme poverty in Africa."

British aid is up - by 13.1 per cent - and so, to the surprise of many campaigners, is that of the US; the Bush administration has almost doubled the share of American GDP spent on aid over the past six years. But France's aid is up only 1.4 per cent and Germany's by a bare 0.9 per cent. Japan's has fallen and Italy's is down a massive 30 per cent.

One area for which the G8 have come up with extra cash is in the fight against Aids. The number of Africans receiving anti-retroviral drugs has grown from only 50,000 to a million. But on this, and on issues such asgetting more children into school, small successes need scaling up to meet the Gleneagles promises, as well as those made in 2000 in the Millennium Development Goals, aimed at halving world poverty by 2015. July will mark the halfway point in the MDG process. The money for all that is simply not there.