Briefing Paper

Rio +20 : Proposals for the African Sustainable Development Agenda

“This policy brief aims at identifying the
potential African positions during the Rio+20
negotiations. It provides an overview of the
existing international commitments reached
during the different sustainable development
summits and events. It also goes through the
different African positions during the preceding negotiation summits,and identifies the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) as a new strategy binding the continent together in terms of a vision of development. This policy brief presents an overview of the progress made on sustainable development on the continent by integrating economic, social and environmental components through the Human Development Index (HDI) and Gender Inequality Index (GII), the Gini Index (GI) and forest conservation. For decades, promoting sustainable development has been an objective of governments, international organisations and bilateral as well as multilateral development partners. The debate on the promotion of sustainable development could be said to have started in 1972 with the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, held between 5 and 16 June 1972 in the Swedish capital.”