He’s saying this is an historic summit.  He is promising (sounds like) big new money for Africa.  He’s saying “our citizens are all hurting.  They need us to come together.”

hi, here it is….mdgs in, social protection in (is it new money? how will it be disbursed?), oda commitments in… lots of debate about tax havens though.

Ensuring a fair and sustainable recovery for all

25. We are determined not only to restore growth but to lay the foundation for a fair and sustainable world economy. We recognise that the current crisis has a disproportionate impact on the vulnerable in the poorest countries and recognise our collective responsibility to mitigate the social impact of the crisis to minimise long-lasting damage to global potential.   To this end:

• we reaffirm our historic commitment to meeting the Millennium Development Goals and to achieving our respective ODA pledges, including commitments on Aid for Trade, debt relief, and the Gleneagles commitments, especially to sub-Saharan Africa;
• the actions and decisions we have taken today will provide $50 billion to support social protection, boost trade and safeguard development in low income countries, as part of the significant increase in crisis support for these and other developing countries and emerging markets;
• we are making available resources for social protection for the poorest countries, including through investing in long-term food security and through voluntary bilateral contributions to the World Bank’s Vulnerability Framework, including the Infrastructure Crisis Facility, and the Rapid Social Response Fund;
• we have committed, consistent with the new income model, that additional resources from agreed sales of IMF gold will be used, together with surplus income, to provide $6 billion additional concessional and flexible finance for the poorest countries over the next 2 to 3 years. We call on the IMF to come forward with concrete proposals at the Spring Meetings; 
• we have agreed to review the flexibility of the Debt Sustainability Framework and call on the IMF and World Bank to report to the IMFC and Development Committee at the Annual Meetings; and
• we call on the UN, working with other global institutions, to establish an effective mechanism to monitor the impact of the crisis on the poorest and most vulnerable.

http://www.londonsummit.gov.uk/resources/en/news/15766232/communique-020409

Here’s what we’ve just issued to the media (I’ll come back with a proper blog in a little while - it’s a bit mad here now!):

G20 summit is ‘ray of hope’ for world’s poorest children

Save the Children said the G20 summit offered “a ray of hope” for the world’s poorest children but warned that pledges in a communiqué mean little unless they are followed by action.

“Nobody should imagine this summit is anything more than a beginning” said Adrian Lovett, Save the Children’s Director of Campaigns. “A communiqué feeds no one and words alone do not save a child’s life. But there is a ray of hope from today’s summit that leaders may have grasped the chance to point the world in a fairer, more just direction. Everything now depends on what those leaders do next.

“Poorer nations have been hit harder than anyone else in this financial meltdown. Up to 2.8 million additional lives could be lost in low-income countries by 2015. Low income countries are facing a dramatic decline in their own economies and aid is therefore even more vital to them today.”
Save the Children’s said success would be judged on the implementation of four key announcements from the summit:

• The important stimulus package agreed at the summit must now deliver real benefits for the world’s poorest, who have been hardest hit by the downturn.
• The clear recommitment from all countries to deliver on their aid promises, despite the downturn, must be enacted by all donor countries
• The promise to increase aid from development banks to poorer countries must deliver genuinely new resources focused on the needs of the poorest
• The promise to work on ways to increase social protection measures that put cash in the hands of the poorest families must be pursued with vigour

“We now need to see a burst of energy to deliver on today’s promises, and a commitment to live up to the spirit of the agreement as well as the letter. We are in the middle of an exceptional crisis and exceptional action is needed to deal with it,” said Adrian Lovett.

“G20 leaders have said that they will do whatever is necessary to revive their own economies. With equal urgency they should do whatever it takes to protect the world’s poorest children from a financial crisis that will deprive millions of them of a decent future.”

How’s it looking?  Not clear how strong the communique will be on the need for leaders to keep their promises on aid – it will be really bad news if there’s any hint of backtracking there.  Still apparently some unresolved areas – will they agree to sell some IMF gold and use it (or at least some of it) to help poorer countries recover?  Will they be decisive in clamping down on tax havens – one of the promises most heavily trailed ahead of this summit?

Just got a hug from Bob Geldof.  He said to me: “Adrian!  SDRs, man!”  I said: “I know!” (I do.  Honest.)

The biggest rock star here though is clearly Obama.  I’m told he’s taking twice as long as he should to get from one meeting to the next because people want to have their photo taken with him in the corridors and are ignoring all protocol in order to get it.  I wonder how long this will last. As for the rest… Apparently Nicolas Sarkozy is given to grand gestures with his arms, Angela Merkel has been pretty quiet, Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi has been very active in the discussions…

In theory Gordon Brown will do a press briefing in a few minutes, so things should be clearer soon…

I’m off to look for a decision-maker.

Me and Dominic poised (like a coiled spring) to blog for the world

My six year old son has told me to make sure I bump into the US President. He wants me to say ‘excuse me, Barack. Just wanted to say (pause to adopt wild west cowboy pose and accent): hi!’ Meanwhile my seven year old daughter reminds me that if I see Obama’s trousers fall down, I need to say ‘Barack (the accent again): your pants have fallen down.’ Top tips.

Truth is I am highly unlikely to see the President at all, except on the big screens in the bloggers and press area. We will be breathing the same ExCel Centre circulated air, but the chances of me coming face to face with Barack Obama – let alone catching him with his pants down – are slightly lower than the odds of the G20 leaders making a cameo appearance in the Grand Designs exhibition happening next door. (Actually that could be good. Meet Barack, Gordon and Nicolas. They’ve decided to knock down their old world order and build a completely new one. They’re going for a modern feel, lots of sunlight, very green. But they can’t seem to agree on the detail – and they’re way over their original budget of £200,000 for the build. So far they’ve spent just over $2.5 trillion. Those floor-to-ceiling windows are looking like an expensive luxury.)

Anyway… Good to see the British hosts got through last night’s summit dinner without a ‘look-at-what-they-were-eating-don’t-they-know-there’s-a-recession-on’ scandal. This has been the trap that successive summit hosts have walked into – last summer’s G8 in Japan managed to cook up a ’17-course banquet’ which kept the press happy for days. Not so here. Welsh Lamb with ‘seashore vegetables’ (what’s that? Seaweed?) and Bakewell Tart with Custard for pudding. Oddly the leaders’ spouses ate separately from their (mostly) husbands, though they got the same dishes. Presumably the Foreign Office took so much time and trouble getting the the menu perfectly balanced to avoid both media outrage and diplomatic insult, that when they finally started on the spouses menu they didn’t have the heart for it and just told Jamie Oliver to make double.

Sad to see Aussie PM Kevin Rudd was seated down the far end of the dinner table, some distance from the big shots. Having become his newst biggest fan since hi appearance in St Paul’s Cathedral on Tuesday, I was hoping he would be able to repeat his line (‘don’t shred your aid commitments’) as he asked Sarkozy or Berlusconi to pass the salt.

Those aid commitments have not yet been shredded, but they are looking distinctly ragged. One of the things we were talking about yesterday with the other bloggers is how the poorest countries are casualties of this crisis on so many levels: falling foreign investment, a drop in the remittances that workers overseas send back home to their families, cuts in world prices for their basic commodities, the impact of foreign exchange fluctuations… If ever there were a time they needed the rich world to keep its aid promises, that time is now. An additional 46 million people – the same as the population of Spain – are being thrown into poverty because of this economic crisis. Half of them are children. As world leaders seek to rebuild the global economy, they must build it with those children’s interests at its heart. That will be the test of this G20. Today’s the day.

Traditionally it used to be the case in Liberia for families to have lunch three times a day but because of the hardship after the war they reduce the meal to two times per day. Last year when I visited families in June, most of them were only eating one meal a day. With the recent raising of food prices I wonder how tough the situation is now for them.

I remember visiting Fatou last year who had to choose between taking her sick baby to the clinic or to make money to feed her family. For women like Fatou, loosing a day of work to attend the clinic means that they will not be able to feed their family. Fatou told me she knew she should take her baby to the clinic to get treatment as soon as the fever started but she could not leave her other children starving.

In rural northern Rwanda, Alphonsine has to work harder and twice than she used to do. There, the daily wage cannot even cover the price of one kilo of bins sold 350 RWF (£0.3). Today, Alphonsine works harder and harder just to pay for food neglecting her child and herself. She even doesn’t have enough to buy cloth to protect her child from getting chest infections.

In the same district, I also met with Immanirakiza who has three children. She told me if she wants to feed her family she has to work every day, and there is no money left to pay for healthcare fees.

This is the picture in most of the African countries. Because of increase of food prices, people have to sacrifice or to renounce to access to basis social services like education or health. It broke my heart when Ciatta a mother in Liberia told me that sometime she feels guilty to see her children going to school with nothing to eat or wondering how they were able to study on an empty stomach.

I wonder if when world leaders plan to save the economy they will think about how to help children like Ciatta’s.

The Germans have not yet reached London, the French haven’t retreated (though Sarkozy is threatening to leave at the first sign of trouble) and as ever, we are hoping the Americans will save the world.

Here at Westminster Central Hall, as D-Day approaches, 50 bloggers from around the world are being briefed before heading to the Excel Centre tomorrow.

Our communications chief Adrian Lovett is delivering a rabble-rousing pep talk as I type.

We bloggers will be inside the G20 meeting and will be blogging, Tweeting and YouTubing live from the most important meeting in the UK since Gleneagles.

Lives hang on this. If we get our messages out there, so that the world can hear and see what is happening – in real time – and so that global citizens can hold leaders to account, then children’s lives will be saved.

I am tapping away on my phone knowing that by blogging, I may make a difference. This is democracy in action.

How exciting!