What is increasingly clear is that when development partners truly work together, they can empower African citizens in their task of holding their governments accountable. They can help African education ministers and NGOs get their children into school and fed, they can get those who need them into health clinics to receive the life-saving AIDS drugs and deliver the life-protecting anti-malarial bed nets into the hands of the mothers and children who need them most. For every tragedy that is Zimbabwe or Sudan or DRC, there are more than twice as many more positive African stories to tell - like Mozambique, Tanzania, Ghana, Benin or Mali.
We want to achieve that success not through a hand-out, but through hard work, persistence, creativity and a true partnership with the developed world. We're not there yet, but we have the roadmap to get there if the West keeps the commitments it made, with such fanfare, at Gleneagles, and if African leaders keep their promises to their citizens too.
Intentions are one thing, follow-through is another and I am deeply worried that France, Germany and Italy are not going to keep the promises they made to Africa in 2005, because then all of Europe will be behind. President Sarkozy, Chancellor Merkel and Prime Minister Berlusconi need to hear more from their citizens on this subject if they are to make the right decisions, both for Europe and Africa. Civil society organisations in these nations and all around the world need to raise their voices louder.
Working together, we can still be the generation that sends extreme poverty in Africa to the history books - if we base our policies on the hard data about what works and what doesn't, and if we raise our voices together as one.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu