African Union (AU) chairman Olusegun Obasanjo called on rich nations on Monday to provide the continent with money rather than sympathy in its fight against poverty at their summit in Scotland this week.
Obasanjo rejected a call to African leaders by AU host Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi that they should not go begging to the rich nations' summit but instead embrace self-reliance.
Obasanjo, president of Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, said he hoped the Group of Eight (G8) summit would extend a recent debt cancellation beyond the 14 African countries that benefited from it.
"This is not the time for a lot of talk but more of a time for serious and concerted action," he told the opening session of a half-yearly summit of the 53-nation African Union.
He praised a British-backed report recommending more help for Africa to be presented to the G8 summit chaired by British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Wednesday and Thursday.
He said the AU summit had to take a collective decision on the need for developed nations to own the report while coming up with the resources to pay for most of its recommendations.
"The current situation in Africa ... is the slow pace of development, increasing poverty and a rising rate of unemployment. These are no doubt unimpressive indicators which can only be redressed through a genuine commitment by the international community to help Africa out of its doldrums," Obasanjo said.
Gadaffi told AU leaders earlier to reject conditional aid from the West.
"Begging will not make the future of Africa, (instead) it creates a greater gap between the great ones and the small ones," he said.
But it is Obasanjo who will be the key influence behind the wording of a message that African leaders are expected to send to the G8 summit about rescuing the continent of 800 million from poverty, war and disease, diplomats say.
IMPROVE QUALITY OF AID:
AU spokesman Desmond Orjiako, a Nigerian, told Reuters: "We have requested Western partners to expedite debt cancellation for the whole of Africa by 2007.
"They should also improve the quality of the aid so that it is really helpful to poor African people."
Many critics of Western aid say it suffers a number of defects, principally that much of it goes to pay expensive Western consultants or that it is conditional on African governments doing business with a donor country's companies.
More than 40 percent of Africans live on less than $1 a day, 200 million Africans are threatened by serious food shortages and AIDS kills more than 2 million Africans a year.
As it does at all its gatherings, the AU at the summit targeted wars as a big barrier to growth on a continent that has seen 186 coups d'etat and 26 major conflicts in the past half century.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the summit nations had a responsibility to protect people from genocide, war crimes and ethnic cleansing if their own governments failed to do so.
Rock stars around the world sang for Africa on Saturday to try to pressure the G8 leaders into action.
There was no mention in the agenda of Zimbabwe, in keeping with the AU's habitual deference to President Robert Mugabe.
But summit guests include European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, who has said Africa must join the rest of the world in condemning Mugabe's crackdown on illegal shantytowns.
AU officials last week rejected calls from non-governmental organisations to intervene in Zimbabwe, saying the crackdown there was an internal affair.
AU Commission Chairman Alpha Oumar Konare called for the cancellation of all Africa's debt and the dismantling of subsidies to rich country farmers that Africans blame for keeping their produce out of rich country markets.
He also made a call for good governance, although he did not mention any particular country.