The APF was established in November 2003 to broaden existing high-level G8/NEPAD dialogue to include Africa's major bilateral and multilateral development partners. Its mission is to strengthen partnership efforts for Africa's development.
The 12th APF meeting held in Rome on 10 June 2009 accepted the offer of the ECA to host a special session of the APF devoted to climate change. This APF decision is consistent with fulfilling the forum’s objective of catalyzing actions, stimulating international discourse and mobilizing partnership support for Africa’s development agenda and priorities.
In this regard, the special session is expected to reinforce the awareness, understanding, measures and actions on African interests and expectations on climate change as promoted by the APF, particularly at its successive 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th meetings in Berlin, Tokyo and Addis Ababa, respectively.
The special APF session will also contribute to implementing African Union summit decisions on climate change and serve to complement the outcomes of related African regional processes including the May 2009 AMCEN special session on climate change held in Nairobi, as another step towards defining African common position on climate change.
The forthcoming session reflects the weight and importance attached to climate change issues within Africa’s development agenda by both Africa and its development partners.
The core objective of APF is to build a coalition around Africa’s key concerns and expectations on climate change in order to ensure that these are adequately addressed in a new climate change agreement expected to be reached at the Fifteenth Conference of Parties (COP-15) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to be held in Copenhagen, Denmark, from 7 to 18 December 2009.
The session will be attended by ministers in charge of the environment from Sierra Leone, DRC, Uganda, Burkina Faso, Rwanda, Cameroon, Sudan, Kenya, Mozambique and Algeria.
Other high-level participants include Mr. Jean Ping, Chairperson of the African Union, Dr. Ibrahim Mayaki, CEO of NEPAD Secretariat, Lord Nicholas Stern, Chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, and Mr. Abdoulie Janneh, UN Under Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of ECA.