Remarks by the Rt Hon Gordon Brown MP, Chancellor of the Exchequer at the launch of the Commission for Africa report at the British Museum

Check against delivery

Africa is a continent ripe for progress - at a moment of opportunity but tragically weighed down by poverty, illiteracy and disease; by the burden of unpayable debts inherited from the past; and now in danger of being failed by millennium promises made but not delivered.

And the economic plans of our Commission for Africa are founded on our evidence that, at best on present progress in sub-Saharan Africa the millennium development promise – free primary education for all - will not be met on time in 2015. Indeed will not be met on present rates of progress until 2130.

The promise to halve poverty will not be met in 2015 but in 2150.

The promise to cut by two-thirds avoidable infant and maternal mortality not by 2015 as promised but by 2165.

Africans have long known the virtues of patience but the whole world should now know that 150 years is too long to ask peoples to wait for justice. And the question we must ask is ‘if not now, then when; if not us, then who?’

When I visited Africa earlier in the year, everywhere I travelled I saw not only the potential and promise for the economic and social growth of Africa but also mothers paid only five pounds a week begging for free education for their children; supporters of AIDS orphans asking only that they have free health care; and men and women everywhere with a yearning that their growing political and constitutional rights now be matched by economic and social opportunities.

So in a new partnership for action set out in our report: to promote the antidote to corruption - deep and wide transparency - and to champion and reward reform - adopting the policies necessary for encouraging private-sector investment and economic development. At the heart of this is our new deal for Africa in debt relief, fair trade and new investment.

We say in our report that justice promised will forever be justice denied until we remove from this generation the burden of debts incurred by past generations.

So we are proposing to the G8 that we write off once and for all the historic but unpayable debts of the past for the poorest countries to the rich and end an injustice that has lasted far too long. I have talked with commissioners and finance ministers about detailed and often difficult proposals to use IMF gold to write off debt; and I have asked World Bank shareholders to take over the debts owed by 70 of the poorest countries to them. The UK has now signed long term agreements with 14 countries. And we - Britain - have announced from now until 2015 we will take responsibility for our share of debts owed to the World Bank and African Development Bank by the poorest African countries. No African country committed to poverty reduction and achieving the Millennium Development Goals should have to choose between servicing its debts and funding schools and healthcare.

We also say that justice promised will forever be justice denied unless we remove trade barriers that undermine economic empowerment and develop infrastructure for economic development.

So ours is the first official report to call for a lasting deep seated trade justice that would mean that Europe and the richest countries be honest about and address the scale of the waste and scandal of agricultural protectionism, unfair rules of origin and much criticised economic partnership agreements and address infrastructure needs – transport, power, water, telecommunications and then technical and vocational skills – to build the capacity African countries need to trade.

Justice promised will forever be justice denied unless the greatest tragedy our time is met by the boldest financial plan for our time - bolder than the Marshall Plan for Europe of the 1940s - so we can deliver health, education and social and economic improvements.

So the report we are launching today challenges the rich countries to reach 0.7 per cent of national income in long-term and predictable aid for investment in the poorest countries. And proposes that on the road to 0.7 per cent, we create now, this year and urgently, an International Finance Facility that would generate up to $50 billion of resources each year from 2005 to 2015 - the quickest most effective way of guaranteeing long-term, stable, predictable funding.

We must start with an International Finance Facility for vaccination and immunisation - which with four billion dollars frontloaded between now and 2015 could save 5 million lives. And we - the UK government - commit today to joining an advance purchase scheme under which - for preventive vaccines for malaria today and for HIV/AIDS in the future - the rich countries underwrite development of vaccines.

Not by this report alone, but most of all by our endeavours in the next few months shall this Commission and the G8 be judged.

With this message and manifesto from this Commission for Africa, the call for justice for Africa – must now be heard at the IMF and World Bank meetings at Easter; at the G8 summit in Gleneagles in July; at the United Nations special summit in New York in September; and at the World Trade talks in Hong Kong in December.

This year, now, urgently. No longer evading, no longer procrastinating, no more excuses. But endeavours which by making change happen this year, can make real the vision of this report of justice on a global scale.