Meeting

Rethinking Africa's Growth Strategy

The economic crisis has led to a reassessment of the systems governing global cooperation, financial architecture and policies linked to trade and climate change, and is a wake-up call to speed up implementation of long-discussed reforms. In this complex and evolving landscape, emerging markets, including those from Africa, are among the first to show signs of a recovery and are forecast to increasingly contribute to global growth in the next decade.

Purpose

Improving the state of the world requires catalysing global cooperation to address pressing challenges and future risks. Global cooperation in turn needs stakeholders from business, government, the media, science, religion, the arts and civil society to collaborate as a true community. To this end, the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting has engaged leaders from all walks of life to shape the global agenda at the start of the year for the last four decades.

The fifth annual IGF Meeting will be held in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Preparing the IGF 2010 Meeting

A first round of open consultations will be held in Geneva on 9 February 2010. The consultations
will take stock of the Sharm El Sheikh meeting and will discuss the agenda and the format of the Vilnius meeting.

The consultations will be followed by a meeting of the Multistakeholder Advisory Group (MAG) on 10-11 February 2010.

Call for contributions:

South Africa's statistics for rape remain some of the highest in the world. Figures for the number of women killed by their intimate male partners are also amongst the world's highest. We may ask, with the country's fourth democratic election imminent, how are political parties proposing to deal with these problems of violence against women?