On 2 and 3 July, SRSG Parfait Onanga-Anyanga attended the Aswan Forum in Cairo, Egypt. This year’s edition focused on ‘Africa in a Changing World: Re-envisioning Global Governance for Peace and Development’, underscoring how ‘existing structures and frameworks of global governance are falling short of ensuring a just and fair global order’.

The Forum looked at the AUPSC’s 20th anniversary, the peace and development nexus and the structural prevention of conflicts in Africa. The ‘African Network on Preventing and Countering Extremism Conducive to Terrorism’, a new initiative spearheaded by the Cairo International Center for Conflict Resolution, Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding (CCCPA), was launched, in line with the AU Convention on the Prevention and Combating of Terrorism and the United Nations (UN) Counterterrorism strategy. The Forum also highlighted the importance of rapidly developing African positions on global governance and development in advance of the Summit of the Future. Participants in the Forum included representatives from the Commission, high-level UN officials, the African Development Bank, the African Union Development Agency - New Partnership for Development, the League of Arab States and the Munich Security Conference.

Panel discussions focused on several key areas deemed essential in reshaping regional and global peace and security, namely: (1) Cultivating Consensus: Towards a Common African Position on Climate, Peace and Security, (2) New Horizons: Towards Fit-for-Purpose Peace Operations in Africa, and (3) From One Agenda for Peace to the Other: Multilateral Peace and Security between Two Eras.