Tony Blair's Africa panel may wind up after two years of its founder missing meetings

The Telegraph ^ | 1/30/2010 | Colin Freeman

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Tony Blair's much vaunted Africa Progress Panel may be wound up, having 'failed' to deliver its anti-poverty pledges - while its founder has not been to meetings for two years.

A top-level panel set up by Tony Blair to monitor official aid pledges to the global Live8 campaign will hold its final scheduled session this week with him not having attended a single meeting since 2007.

Convened with great fanfare in the wake of the 2005 G8 summit at Gleneagles, the Africa Progress Panel was charged with ensuring that Western governments did not renege on their promises to pump billions of dollars of extra cash into fighting poverty.

(Front Row) President of Africa Progress Panel Kofi Annan, Chancellor Angela Merkel, ex-Prime Minister
Tony Blair and (Back Row) Bob Geldof

When announced by Mr Blair, who once described Africa as “a scar on the conscience of the world”, he said its remit would be as a high profile watchdog ensuring that Africa’s plight did not “slip out of the headlines”.

Yet the panel, which includes Bob Geldof as a member and has had about £1.5 million of taxpayer funding, faces the prospect of being wound up in Geneva on Wednesday despite only about half of the G8 pledges having been honoured.

Some of those close to the organisation believe that there is no point in it continuing in its current form. At most, they say, it should be scaled down to a few key staff and shed its high-profile membership line-up, which has failed to deliver the clout that was hoped for.

One insider told The Sunday Telegraph that it had achieved “nothing whatsoever”, and accused Mr Blair of having lost interest in it after setting it up. The former prime minister, who is

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“As far as we can see, he got his moment of glory when he launched it and that was that. Partly as a result, the panel itself has hasn’t achieved anything either. Basically, several million dollars have been spent, and nobody in Africa is any better off.” Says it all.