African Solutions

As its theme Refugees, Returnees and Internally Displaced Persons: Toward Durable Solutions to Forced displacement in Africa suggests, the two-day 32nd African Union (AU) Summit agreed on durable solutions to address the continent’s decades long problems of refugees, returnees and internally displaced persons. The summit took place on February 10-11 at the AU Headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

At the opening ceremony, Egyptian President Abdul Fatah al-sisi, who took over the rotating AU chairmanship from Rwandan President Paul Kagame, called for efforts to promote peace and security as well as solidarity with refugees, migrants and internally displaced persons. More importantly, he stressed the importance of deepening the principle of “African solutions for Africa’s problems” as the only way to tackle the continent’s mutual challenges.

Frequent natural disasters, regional conflicts and wars, terrorism and extremism, climate change and shortage of water resources are the main reasons for human displacement. To address these root causes it is recommended that African countries, led by the AU, join hands and create a sustainable, peaceful and prosperous continent through accelerating economic integration and strengthening education and vocational training for young people. This will give African refugees hope of returning home.

Promoting development can help Africa increase its capacity of dealing with the refugee problem, as most refugee source regions are underdeveloped with backward economic development. In this regard, China has been assisting African countries in improving its connectivity, intra-continental trade and youth education.

At the Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-africa Cooperation held in China in September last year, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced eight major initiatives to promote China-africa cooperation and pledged a $60-billion financial package to back the initiatives.

Particularly, the eight initiatives include a capacity building initiative, under which China hopes to share its development practices with Africa. In the following three years, 10 Luban Workshops will be set up in Africa to provide vocational training for young Africans. China will also provide Africa with 50,000 government scholarships and 50,000 training opportunities for seminars and workshops, and will invite 2,000 young Africans to visit China for people-to-people exchanges.

The African economy still has a long way to go before realizing sustainable development and it is impossible for the continent to totally rely on foreign investment and external influence for development. It needs to increase its internal development capacity. For Africa, only by fully tapping its own development potential, such as promoting domestic demands by growing the middle class, improving its intra-connectivity, encouraging trade within the continent, exploring and giving full play to its own comparative advantages, lifting the overall caliber of human resources through education and training and improving the investment environment, can the continent maintain the momentum to continue its current development strategy and totally eradicate the root causes of the refugee problem.

CA