UN General Assembly
1995

population-growth rate, which is, unfortunately, the highest in the world. Africa has been used over the past 20 years, and is still being used, as a policy laboratory for the Bretton Woods institutions. It is regrettable that today, as the United Nations celebrates its fiftieth year since the signing of the Organization’s Charter in San Francisco, many people in Africa continue to live under even harsher conditions of poverty, hunger, disease, civil war and natural disaster. The plight of the African continent remains a major challenge for the emerging world order. There is an urgent need for a stronger consolidated effort to pull the continent out of the poverty trap into which it continues to sink. A few months ago at Geneva, the Economic and Social Council, at the high-level segment of its 1995 substantive session, deliberated an item entitled “The development of Africa, including the implementation of the United Nations New Agenda for the Development of Africa in the 1990s”. The high-level segment recognized that, among all the five regions of the world, Africa