Merkel to host G20- Africa meet

Conference to fight poverty, mass migration to Europe

German Chancellor Angela Merkel hosts African leaders Monday for a G20 conference aimed at fighting the grinding poverty driving the mass migrant influx to Europe.

The idea is to team up African nations willing to reform with the world’s biggest economies and private investors to bring business and jobs to a continent where instability and corruption often scare off foreign companies.

“The global community has an interest in the better economic development of Africa,” said German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble.

Merkel is hosting the initiative as part of Germany’s presidency of the Group of 20 biggest economies, whose leaders meet in the northern port of Hamburg a month later.

Invited to Berlin are the leaders of Egypt, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal and Tunisia, as well as the heads of the World Bank, IMF and African Union.

In Africa – whose population is set to double by mid- century – economies need to grow equally fast “and promise a future for young people, which would also help to ease migratory pressures,” said Merkel’s spokeswoman Ulrike Demmer.

Germany, Europe’s largest economy, has taken in more than one million asylum seekers since 2015 – more than half from war- torn Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, but also many thousands from Ethiopia, Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa.

Hundreds of thousands more have trekked through the Sahara into lawless Libya, hoping that traffickers there will take them in rickety boats across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe.

IMF chief Christine Lagarde said that “having people flee from many sub- Saharan coun- tries to reach better shores is not a sustainable response.”

“Creating the economic circumstances where people can live, grow, be educated and create value for themselves and their families at home is the way to go,” she told business daily Handelsblatt.

Merkel last year visited major migration transit countries Mali and Niger as well as Ethiopia, the seat of the African Union, and pledged 27 million euros ($ 30 million) in aid aiming to stop migrants heading for Europe in the first place.