South Africa heads to the G20 summit tasked with being the voice for a continent where poor states are in danger of fading into the background as economic giants thrash out their woes.

With its own economy struggling to escape recession, Africa's powerhouse and sole G20 representative will have to focus the attention of world leaders on developing countries even harder hit by the global economic backwash.

As industrialised nations meeting in London grapple with the reform of global financial institutions, stimulus packages and the role of protectionism, Africa will seek assurance of sustained financial support, analysts say.

Containing the negative

"Africa will be most concerned with containing the negative fallout from the actions of others on their own economies," said Peter Draper of the South African Institute of International Affairs trade programme.

Falling commodity prices and remittance earnings as a result of crashing markets elsewhere have hammered developing economies.

"Many countries have recently emerged from macro-economic crises and some of them may be forced back into default positions. This could undermine decades of very painful reform ... through no fault of their own," Draper told AFP.

Draper said the reform of multilateral finance institutions, conditions around which finance is granted and increasing resources available to the IMF were Africa's greatest concerns.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon has suggested the need for a massive international stimulus of at least one-trillion dollars to support the most vulnerable countries.

Rhazia Khan, an economist from Standard Chartered Bank, said while many had thought the continent would be relatively immune, the crisis had seen finance dry up with risk averse investors avoiding illiquid markets and the withdrawal of portfolio investor interest in frontier markets.

Human costs

"The problem that African countries face is they are not seen in the same light, but the human costs of the crisis are still very real. The real concern for Africa that it's just left to the side in all this debate. There is a lot of responsibility for South Africa."

With money being pumped into reviving developed economies, it remains to be seen how much will remain for foreign development assistance.

"Because attention is diverted elsewhere to systemically more important countries there is a risk of even greater marginalisation of Africa. One of the hurdles we have to overcome is saying we shouldn't all be in this for ourselves, we need to deal with it on a more holistic basis."

The hardest hit are commodity producers such as Botswana, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo whose mining based economies have no safety net while oil giants are faring slightly better.

A second tier of countries that will suffer down the line are those such as Uganda and Tanzania who rely heavily on donor funding for up to 40 percent of their national budgets.

Real aid fears

"We have a real fear that the G20 summit will evoke a possible reduction in aid to developing countries," Congolese transport minister and government spokesperson Alain Akouala Atipault told AFP.

Amid the economic turmoil, growth in Africa is expected to fall to 3.4 percent in 2009 after nine years of growth well above that level and Khan said Africa had to realise the urgency of reducing reliance on aid.

"It is going to be an eye opener. For too long there has been relative complacency about the time available to reduce dependency on donors. There is an urgency to developing the domestic economy to have a wider more varied base."

Mohamed Mbodj of Dakar's International Transparency Forum laments the lack of interest by African authorities in the economic crisis.

"The African diary is polluted by political problems whereas it is the economy which is the lever that will allow Africa to escape its problems."

AFP

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