Since the 1960s, Africa has been diverging from other developing regions at an accelerating rate, a trend that will surely generate unmanageable social pressures. That Africa should be on the agenda of the Group of Eight advanced countries both in 2005 and 2007 is therefore appropriate. Sadly, however, at their 2005 Gleneagles summit, G8 governments chose theatre over substance: aid and debt relief may please the street but they are insufficiently potent instruments to fix Africa's deep problems. We have other instruments that were used to rebuild Europe and we need to use them.

Africa faces three distinctive economic problems, each amenable to a distinct policy. The first is that the region has failed to diversifyinto labour-intensive manufactures. Although some countries cannot hope to break into global markets - the landlocked, the resource-rich and the failing states - others, such as Kenya, Ghana and Senegal, are well suited for manufactured exports. Unfortunately, in the 1980s when Asia first penetrated these global markets, coastal Africa was mired in poor governance and conflict. Africa's belated improvements have come too late: the region has missed the globalisation boat. Asian cities now have massive agglomeration economies. African exports need to be pump-primed over the entry threshold constituted by these competing agglomerations and this needs a temporary advantage over Asia in markets of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Both Europe and the US already provide this through programmes such as Everything-but-Arms (EBA) and the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa).