The 2009 London G20 Summit is finally really wrapping up. Below are some excerpts from ONE’s reaction to the summit’s communique. You can see the full release here.

“ONE today welcomed commitments to the world’s poorest countries in the G20’s final deal, but warned that funds announced for them must not create a new debt crisis.

“The G20 have come up with impressive numbers; it’s what they do with them now that counts”, said Oliver Buston, Europe Director for ONE. “Is the US$50bn announced for Low Income Countries grants or loans? To fight the crisis, Africa needs new effective aid on top of existing promises, not expensive loans.

“Thanks to Gordon Brown’s leadership, the world’s poorest have not been forgotten, now their participation in international talks needs to grow”, he said.”

We will need to look over the details of what’s been decided over the next days and weeks, but we should remember that a few months ago we weren’t even sure if developing countries would be on the agenda at this G20 meeting. There’s certainly a lot of work ahead but ONE members campaigned for African voices and for resources, reform and regulation, and today we made some good progress towards these goals.

This entire experience personally, of attending the summit as part of the G20 Voice project, has been an absolute honor. I’ll post more about that tomorrow.

-Virginia Simmons