The AU was perhaps lucky that its first G20 was chaired by the like-minded Brazilian President Lula da Silva.

The African Union (AU) appears to have had a good first G20 Summit this week. The 86-point G20 Rio de Janeiro Leaders’ Declaration ticked most of the boxes of the AU’s key priorities.

In October, Albert Muchanga, AU Commissioner for Economic Development, Tourism, Trade, Industry and Minerals and the AU Sherpa for the G20, had in consultations with South Africa, outlined the AU’s priorities. These aligned with the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and AU Agenda 2063.

The six priorities were inclusive growth, reforming the global financial architecture, ensuring food security and agriculture adaptation to climate change, facilitating a just transition, promoting trade and investment, and enhancing health.

Matching those precisely with the summit declaration is impossible, and the statement doesn’t explicitly mention Agenda 2063. But it does commit to the more universal Agenda 2030, which sets out the SDGs. And on many other points it covers the same ground as the AU’s six priorities.

Brazil’s overall theme, ‘Building a just world and a sustainable planet’, and its focus on three overarching priorities aligned with the AU’s priorities. These were social inclusion and fighting hunger and poverty; sustainable development, energy transitions and climate action; and reforming global governance institutions.

The country’s launch this week of the Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty also largely aligned with AU priorities. It noted that since the Covid-19 pandemic, hunger levels worldwide had risen, ‘reaching … around 733-million people in 2023.’

AU Chairperson Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Ghazouani, representing the AU at the summit, devoted his speech to this alliance, thanking Brazil for launching it and offering Africa’s support.

He said Africa was the continent most affected by poverty and hunger, with one in five suffering from malnutrition and over 300-million Africans expected to be chronically undernourished by 2030 if no action was taken.

He attributed this to economic imbalances, deep social disparities, armed conflict, political instability, rapid population growth and climate change. Ghazouani said the AU had drafted a global strategy for the African agricultural development programme for 2026-35 and a complementary Kampala Declaration to be adopted at the January 2025 AU summit.

The G20 Rio Summit addressed African priorities by committing to work towards low-cost financing for developing countries to support their transitions to low-carbon emissions. It endorsed the voluntary Principles for Just and Inclusive Energy Transitions adopted by the G20 Energy Transitions Working Group.

Leaders also called for a larger UN Security Council to give more say to ‘underrepresented and unrepresented’ regions and groups, such as Africa, Asia-Pacific and Latin America and the Caribbean. The declaration did not however, contain an explicit call for Africa and other regions to be given permanent seats.

Regarding the AU’s call for reforming the global financial architecture, the Rio Declaration reaffirmed last year’s summit declaration ‘to collectively mobilise more headroom and concessional finance to boost World Bank capacity to help low- and middle-income countries [needing] help in addressing global challenges.’

The leaders underscored the need to improve developing countries’ role in decision-making in multilateral development banks and other international economic and financial institutions. They welcomed the creation of a 25th Chair at the International Monetary Fund Executive Board to enhance sub-Saharan Africa’s voice and representation.

They also called for a revival of the rather moribund World Trade Organization, focusing on development and its broken dispute resolution appeal mechanism. The declaration acknowledged the need to better address debt vulnerabilities in low- and middle-income countries – though debt apparently wasn’t identified by Muchanga as an AU priority.

Nor was peace. The summit declaration touched on this generally and tangentially by prefixing its reform of global governance chapter by saying, ‘There will be no sustainability nor prosperity without peace,’ and attaining peace required reformed global governance.

The leaders committed to strengthening the UN’s Peacebuilding Commission’s role in tackling the causes and drivers of conflicts. And to ‘mobilising political and financial support’ to enable the commission to help countries avoid relapses into conflict.

However, Sanusha Naidu, Institute for Global Dialogue Senior Research Fellow, told ISS Today: ‘You cannot achieve stability, economic development and equality without having peace and security and stability on the agenda’. For her, this was one of the ‘missing pieces in this G20 Summit.’ Naidu said South Africa should ensure that peace is given more attention during its G20 presidency, which kicks in on 1 December.

Before the summit, there were many questions on whether African countries could reach consensus about Africa’s priorities and whether the AU could shape a favourable outcome. 

Ghazouani and AU Commission Chairperson Moussa Faki Mahamat – who the AU Assembly had decided should represent the continental body – were not highly visible at the summit. But the fact that the outcome strongly reflected African interests suggested that the many pre-summit meetings the AU had with Brazil and South Africa had been successful.

Perhaps the AU was also lucky that its first G20 Summit after being admitted a year ago, was chaired by Brazil’s president Lula da Silva. And that the troika of countries helping organise the summit comprised Brazil, India (as the previous G20 president) and South Africa (succeeding president).

So it was a summit directed by largely like-minded, development-oriented countries. Next year in South Africa should be similar. The following year, when United States President Donald Trump chairs the G20, could present a real test of the AU’s effectiveness in the organisation.

Perhaps the AU can take comfort, as Ramaphosa evidently did, that the G20 appears to have moved at this summit from consensus-based decision making to ‘sufficient consensus.’ That was inspired by Trump’s ideological kindred spirit, the right-wing populist Argentine President Javier Milei, who dissented from several key decisions in Rio, including imposing a 2% tax on global billionaires to help fund the SDGs.

For a moment, much of the socially progressive aspects of the declaration were in the balance. But then Argentina agreed not to block overall agreement, but just register its disagreement. And so the declaration could proceed.

Written by Peter Fabricius, Consultant, ISS Pretoria