G7 Finance Ministers arriving today in Lecce, Italy, must urgently deliver a plan showing how they will meet the promises to Africa they made four years ago at the Gleneagles Summit, global advocacy group ONE said today.

“This meeting of Finance Ministers offers an important chance for the laggards among the G8 – namely Italy and France – to show that they intend to honour their promises”, said ONE’s Europe Director Oliver Buston. “With less than one month to go until the G8 Summit itself, there is still time for them to take urgent remedial action to get back on track.”

ONE’s 2009 DATA report (www.one.org/report), launched yesterday in London by a panel including Bill Gates and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, showed how G8 host Italy, and also France, are dragging down the efforts of other G8 countries, particularly the pledge to double development assistance to Africa by 2010. Italy and France will be responsible for 80 per cent of this year’s funding shortfall, the Report says, with Italy having so far delivered only three per cent of what was promised in 2005.

As part of the Finance Ministers’ Meeting, a new initiative will be launched today to incentivise the development vaccine to help poor countries fight pneumococcal infection which kills one million children under five every year. Italy is a major funder of the scheme.

“Italy is showing true compassion and leadership by supporting this life-saving vaccine initiative to tackle the world’s leading killer of children under five,” said Buston. “We’d like to see them build on this to scale up their support across the board and reverse the damaging cuts they’ve made to their aid budget.”

The “Advanced Market Commitment” is a US$1.5bn partnership between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the governments of Italy, Canada, Russia, the UK and Norway. It aims to incentivise the development of such a vaccine for poor countries by pharmaceutical companies. Italy has promised US$635m over about ten years.

Finance Ministers will also discuss proposals to free up more funding for the poorest countries from innovative sources, including a sell-off a tiny proportion of gold reserves held by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as agreed at the G20’s London Summit in April.

“There is a golden opportunity to be grasped this weekend,” said Buston. “Finance Ministers should champion the use of a tiny proportion of the IMF’s gold reserves to help poor countries that have been rocked by the global economic crisis. This can be done quickly, and with no cost to the G7 or other countries.”