Amsterdam, June 27th 2022–The members of the G7 aim to raise $600 billion in five years in private and public funds to finance infrastructure in developing countries, the White House reports. The US is responsible for $200 billion, the European Union for $300 billion.
The G7 initiative will be titled Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGI) and will counterbalance China’s comparable Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
US President Joe Biden will unveil the plans along with leaders from Britain, Germany, Japan, the EU and Canada at their annual meeting, to be held this year at Schloss Elmau, 75 kilometers south of Munich. French President Emmanuel Macron, whose country is already formally participating in China’s infrastructure program, will not attend the unveiling. As an EU member, France is nevertheless involved in the G7 initiative.
The US pledges to focus on projects that help tackle climate change and improve global health, gender equality and digital infrastructure, the White House said.
One example is a public-private project in Angola for solar energy, worth 2 billion dollars.
An example of a smaller project is the $3.3 million technical support to the Institut Pasteur de Dakar in Senegal. That organization is developing a factory in that country for the large-scale production of corona vaccines and other vaccines.
The China BRI program, launched by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013, includes development and investment initiatives in more than 100 countries, with projects that include railways, ports and highways.
The G7 is an economic issues consultative group of Canada, Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, Japan and the US. The EU has also been involved since 1977. It was at the beginning in 1975 a meeting in a castle near Paris where the first members spoke informally about world problems, but the G7 has gained more and more weight as a Western summit.
