 I don't need to tell you who I am or what my job is. I think it's been very well explained by Nora. But I came into this job two years ago with the foundation of the external action service from 25 years in the British diplomatic service and before that, rather a lot of years at university, mainly studying Africa. The British diplomatic service decided it was much more useful for me to spend my time dealing with Europe rather than Africa. So I spent nine or ten years dealing with nothing but Europe, but I've managed to work my way back to Africa in the end. Therefore, although I want to focus particularly on what has happened over the last two years, what will happen over the coming years, and I will draw to some extent on my experience of that background in the conclusions that I draw about where we are and where we should be going. For the last two years, you could say that EU-Africa relations have pursued a relatively steady course. There is a structure, there are habits of work that have been built up over time between the European Union and Africa, which are just carrying on. There is a cottonew treaty, the successor to the Lome Treaty, which defines our trade relations and our trade and development relations. The trade bit of it is gradually drifting off into potentially economic partnership agreements, about which I'll say some more later. But the cottonew treaty remains an institutional structure. Secondly, we have a political framework in the joint Africa-EU strategy, the jazz, as it's called, which was agreed at the Lisbon EU-Africa summit in 2007. That again provides some underlying principles and a structure to carry that forward. It's rather a long strategy, but nevertheless it has some extremely good, solid principles to underpin our relations. Similarly, on the trade side, we are in a bit of a transition from the old duty-free, quota-free access that was guaranteed under the Lome Convention to Economic Partnership Agreements, which are WTO compatible. But in fact most African countries are covered by the everything-but-arms agreement that enables continued duty-free, quota-free access for most products out of Africa and applies to the majority of countries that we deal with. And there has been on top of that a growing political cooperation with African countries and particularly African organisations, with the African Union, with ECOWAS, SADIC, EGAD in the Horn of Africa, where we work together to try and resolve crises that arise. And that cooperation has again been developing over time and getting closer. So things, in terms of our broad relations, appear to be going reasonably well. But nevertheless it is, for a number of reasons, time to take a fresh look at that relationship. And this is because of both factors on the European side, the fact that Europe itself is changing, but more particularly the speed and the extent of developments on the African side. And we need to adjust the relationship to those changes that are taking place. I need not say very much about what is changing on the European side as you're in the middle of it. And you know well enough that Europe has been facing some tough challenges. It is interesting the feedback I get from how this is seen in Africa. And it is seen as a serious matter of concern for Africans. Because a large part of their trade relations and a lot of their personal relations through the diaspora actually live and work in Europe and a lot of their imports and exports come to and from. And they are worried that the slowdown in Europe will have knock-on effects for Africa. From our side it affects the relationship because Africa remains one of the few relatively fast growing areas of the global economy. And for us it presents tremendous opportunity in that Europe, to get its economy going again, needs to build on growth that is happening elsewhere in the world and therefore has become an increasing interest for us. We, to some extent, are more interested than before in helping Africa achieve faster development and growth. So that's a self-interest there. We are also in the process of negotiating the next multi-annual financial framework that you use budget for the next 76-year period. And the development budget is a significant part of that. We don't yet know what the outcome will be. But for many African countries, the scale of our development assistance, we are in most African countries, one of the biggest and in several the biggest donor, will make a significant difference to them. So they watch with interest and some nervousness as to what the outcome of those negotiations will be. But politically, in Europe, Africa remains not the number one foreign policy preoccupation that for a while is going to remain the Middle East. But nevertheless it's quite high up there. Interest remains lively, not just on the economic side but also from the civil society communities who follow development issues, who follow human rights issues, and from NGOs who are very much involved with the response to crises. So Africa is maintaining its profile in Europe and the links with the diaspora communities have been getting stronger all the time. And in some parts of Europe these are beginning to play a significant electoral role. There are some constituencies in the UK where the majority of the electorate are Nigerian. So there is a direct input to European policy making there. But let me look at the African side because there the pace of change is accelerating in Africa. As I said, economically it is at the moment the fastest growing continent. It is not quite as fast as China which maintains about 7%. The average rate of growth is about 5% a year at the moment. Nevertheless that is healthy and it looks set to sustain itself because it is not wholly dependent on export to the rest of the world. There is a growing amount of domestically generated economic growth in Africa. This varies from place to place but it is bringing with it a degree of social change that is changing the political spectrum in a number of countries. There is an emerging African middle class, if I use that whole term, of people who have some surplus money. They are not simply concerned with their own subsistence enough to keep the family going but they have some surplus spending power. And this varies and still it is a phenomenon that is primarily urban and it is limited to a relatively small number of countries. But in places like Kenya, like Zimbabwe, like Ghana, like Nigeria, like Senegal, like Zambia, like Botswana, even in Angola. This emerging class is becoming increasingly influential in African politics and it is an emerging class that has a great interest in maintaining political stability. This reinforces a shift from the stability of autocracy to the stability of democracy, which again you see beginning to take place in some of these countries and some others. But it is a very bumpy process and just to digress for a minute, if you look at the process by which states were formed and coalesced over hundreds of years in Western Europe. That too was a fairly bloody process. In the 50 years since independence in Africa there have been a lot of conflicts but hardly any of them have been conflicts between countries. They have been conflicts within countries, rebellions, coups, secessions, insurgencies, occasionally straightforward civil wars. This is partly a product of the irrational random boundaries which African countries themselves decided to preserve and therefore within each of those African societies have had to find ways that the people lumped together in these random units can achieve a political structure that enables them to resolve the conflicts of interest and pursue a common interest and that takes time. This dynamic process has since independence happened a whole lot faster than it happened in Europe. Gradually you are seeing the emergence of more stable political structures and more accountable structures based around achieving some balance between the groups that are there, achieving greater accountability and finally developing what I would call trust. Any political system depends on a degree of trust and it is not something that instantly appears. Most African countries were ruled by a nationalist party after independence that had achieved its legitimacy through the nationalist struggle. That fades over time. Your legitimacy has to come from somewhere else. This process is still going on in Zimbabwe and one or two other places. But in others, legitimacy has to come from somewhere else. This links through the process by which accountability and the democratic structure is brought into play. This is relevant for what the EU is trying to do in Africa. I'll come on to why. But this political process explains why a lot of African countries went through a period of 10, 20 years of instability, some soon after independence, some like Côte d'Ivoire only just recently. And that is part of the process of trying to achieve this balance, this accountability in these countries. A lot of the problem with EU-Africa relations has revolved around, I think, a misunderstanding of this process, which has led to a feeling of paternalism and tension in the relations. Linked possibly also to the fact that the European Union includes a number of former colonial powers who have some historical baggage in their relationship. I'll come back to this point as well. The third area where things are changing is in the global environment in which the EU-Africa relationship takes place. It's not a vacuum. China, Russia, to a lesser extent, but India and Brazil and Turkey are all taking far greater interest in Africa, largely for commercial and economic reasons, but also to some extent geo-strategic. And Africa is finally itself attractive. It has a number of suitors. It has people keen to come and invest their money there. Europe is not the be-all and end-all of their relations with the outside world, and we must be aware of that in trying to build a relationship that will be beneficial, stable and productive for the future. So those are the three dynamic elements that we need to take into account in looking at the EU-Africa experience. Where do we go from here? I characterize our current approach to Africa as pulled together by the EAS on behalf of the European Union as revolving around three things, peace, prosperity and partnership. And in terms of peace, our approach is not just conflict resolution and conflict prevention, but helping Africa build the institutions that will enable them to resolve political conflict peacefully. And this comes back to the analysis of what's been happening in Africa. And this institution building is something that we can help with. It's something that has to come from the societies themselves, but through support to building a judicial system that works, building an administration, a government structure that is capable, enabling financial structures to be accountable, revenue-raising, spending, as we have seen lately in Uganda, we were just discussing over lunch, and putting in place these structures and encouraging civil society, which always has a vital role to play in developing a stable political culture, are areas that are an integral part of ensuring peaceful development across Africa. So it's not just security, it's the much wider good governance agenda. Secondly, in prosperity, clearly our development assistance is important for many African countries. It's the most important part of the relationship. But again, we need to look wider than that because our future interest is going to be shifting from aid to investment. In the long run, aid is going to decrease, and investment should increase. That's in our interests, and it's in the interests of African countries. So we need to look ahead and anticipate that. So building an attractive investment climate, again building the infrastructure legal as well as physical that will enable these countries to grow, developing entrepreneurship in African countries, helping create a banking system that will provide credit so businesses can grow. All this is part of the wider prosperity agenda that the EU should validly focus on, and it goes with our trade relations as well. And the third partnership is basically the means by which we try and deliver those two objectives. And we partner within the EU, doing all the different institutions with the member states. We partner internationally with the US, with the World Bank, the IMF, the African Development Bank, the UN with China. We pursue a partnership, perhaps some tri-national cooperation with China, for example on Sudan. But most importantly, with the African organizations and countries themselves, whether it's the African Union or the regional blocs or individual countries. So that's the kind of structure. I don't think that's going to change. Those just represent our fundamental interests, the sinews of a relationship that we would have with any country, whether it's Japan or Ecuador. So we need to look at how in the future we take account of the changing world environment on these kind of things. There is an area which is of immediate concern and that is how we collectively as Europe and with Africans respond to the crises that arise all the time. The places where a stable political structure does not exist. And that will remain a fundamental interest for us, partly because it's the humanitarian aspects of a crisis, whether it's sexual violence in eastern Congo or it's the application of very rigid sharia law in the Sahel in Mali. These things attract public interest. There is a political demand that we try to help people. Or if it's the droughts that hit both Somalia and the Sahel last year, there is a humanitarian imperative that we should help in these kind of circumstances. That will continue and we must respond to it. It's a natural human response. It's also written into the EU's DNA to try and help people in those circumstances. And as often as not, there is a first response. You need to keep people alive by putting in humanitarian aid. This needs to be followed by a political and an economic response. And increasingly the EU is pulling together all these threads because no problem can be solved in simple terms. Security interacts with development. You need both in order to achieve a stable outcome and you need to engage it with the politics. And this is the kind of approach we've been taking in Somalia and why Somalia is gradually getting onto the right track. It illustrates quite well how if we take an integrated and collaborative approach to responding to these crises, we can help move a country out of chronic instability towards at least the path towards a greater political stability. It's not there yet. It could fall off the rails. It could start sliding back downhill. But at the moment it's heading in the right direction because over an extended period of time, we have built a relationship with the African Union, who provide the troops in Amesom who are driving the Al-Shabab effectively rebel and terrorist organisation out of control, which is funded by the EU and the US and the UN, working together. But it's an African Union-led force provided by Ugandans and Burundians. And underpinning that, we worked with the UN and with all the neighbouring countries, with Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, to put pressure on the Somali domestic politicians to actually settle some of their internesine political strife that was basically blocking any progress towards a real political settlement. And it was that international framework that forced Somali politicians to bury enough of their differences to complete a transition process, move to a federal government. It's a very weak government. It's starting to reconstruct a state from scratch. We can help with that and we should help with that. It's in the interests of Somalis, it's in the interests of the neighbouring countries of Africa and it's in our interests. Because only once you've re-established a state and the rule of law in that area can the Somalis themselves bear down on the threats that are currently being posed to the rest of the world from piracy, from terrorist activities. We need to re-establish the rule of law. The rule of law needs an effective state. Similar considerations apply in the eastern Congo. You've had an area which effectively has been government-less and it has been a zone of great conflict. There are a number of drivers for that conflict. There's the legacy of 1994. There are long-standing ethnic differences. Violence breeds violence in itself. It becomes a repeated habit. There are valuable resources buried there that some people wish to control the distribution of. And there's been a state that was incapable of assuring the security of the people that lived there or any kind of efficient administration. We have to look at all those drivers of the conflict there, including the interests of the neighbouring countries, including Rwanda, including Uganda, if we're to build a stable future structure. That will enable the people there to live in peace and start trying to develop their own lives and stop the humanitarian crisis that is recurring. Similar applies to the Sahel and the crisis in Mali. Mali demonstrates that even what we think may be a democratic stable state is not necessarily. And it collapsed like a house of cards with a little push from a few well-armed Tuareg mercenaries returning from Libya. But it collapsed not just because of them, but because the whole structure was rotten from the inside. And we, in helping the Malians reconstruct a state, once a country falls apart, it's much more difficult to put it back together again. And in this sort of empty, dumpty task, we have to help the Malian politicians find a way that they can rebuild a political structure that people will trust. They can rebuild an army that can effectively defend its own people. And we can generate enough economic development in that space that it's not more attractive to take European hostage or to run drugs through there. But at the moment, again, in northern Mali, you have an ungoverned space and drug trafficking, terrorist training, all kinds of criminal activities can flourish there undisturbed by any rule of law. And that's not desirable for the Malians. It's not desirable for the countries around about who may suffer from contagion. It's not desirable for Europe because the drugs and the terrorists may end up here. So again, we can only solve that problem if we work with the regional organisation ECOWAS, if we work with the United Nations, if we work with the African Union. And again, we have levers we can deploy, which are all the instruments we have through our development programme, our humanitarian support, our political dialogues with these people and through the security initiatives that we're able to take, training the Malian army. This is the way we need to work in the future. And it's better if we acknowledge that that the EU's role is to play an integral part in these collective enterprises to help people build stable political structures. The second area where we've got to look to the future is again how we achieve this prosperity. And it builds on what I was saying before that we've got to look at a shift from aid to investment. And we have to build that into our future design of the policy we're developing. There is still, and I see it regularly when I visit, a degree of assumption that the European Union is there to provide aid. We do. We provide a lot of aid. A lot of it is well spent. Some of it isn't. The European Court of Orders bear down on that, independent or audits undertaken by other organisations bear down on that. But the bulk of it is well spent. But again, these countries all need to have a self-sustaining, self-generating economic process. And actually, where is the real growth coming from? It's not coming from the aid-assisted areas, it's coming from the private sector. And a part of this is also helping these countries develop structures that will enable raw material production to be done for the benefit of the people, whether it's oil, whether it's gold, whether it's rare earths, whether it's bauxite, whatever, whether it's timber, all kinds of natural resources. We need to ensure that there is transparency, there is commercial balance in a relationship. Chinese businessmen coming to Africa are no different from Western businessmen. They want to make a profit. And where the money comes from is frankly irrelevant. You want the investment, but you need the investment on terms that will be beneficial to the country, not just some individuals in a country, but the people of a country as a whole. And that is something, again, we can help with because we have experience and because we can provide expertise support capacity building, so that then these countries are able to sustain that themselves. This is what I was doing partly in Ghana as they were preparing to produce oil for the first time. And they were very rigorous about trying to put in place a regulatory structure and accountability for where the revenue went, which would avoid some of the problems that neighbouring countries have suffered. So that is the fresh look we should have at our economic relationship. You can ask me about EPAS in the question and asker answer question session. Third area we have got to look is again EU and Africa in relation to the world as a whole. And this is in some ways an easier area because where we are looking at the global threats, climate change, drug trafficking, piracy, all these kinds of issues, there is not an old fashioned donor-recipient relationship. There are simply two members of the global community facing the same problem and we need to try and find a collective answer. And interestingly on the climate change negotiations, the EU and the EU, African Union position are often closer than that between the Africans and some of their normal international allies in the G77 or the BRICS groups. And so the European Union, African Union are able to help break down some of these traditional international groupings to look for a genuine solution to a genuine global problem in which we have a common interest. March the same applies to drug trafficking. Drug trafficking is good for nobody except the drug traffickers. And again we have a shared interest as we've seen in Mexico being on a drug route even if you're not consuming is not a good thing to be. The money will always distort and death will always follow and West Africa is at risk of that happening there. And therefore we want to help West African countries realise the scale of that risk and try and tackle it. And it's not just Guinea Bissau that is a trafficking route or Northern Mali. A lot of the countries along the West African coast are at risk from becoming routes for drug trafficking. And the amounts of money are huge. This is why drug traffickers find it very easy just to buy their way in. And do not underestimate the volume of the drugs being trafficked through there. One other area I'll mention in this is actually technological innovation and development. Interestingly 100 years ago, yes 100 years ago, there was a big investment by the then colonial powers in research as to how to develop African economies. And all over Africa you'll find agricultural research stations that were set up in the 1920s, 1930s and did great work falling into disuse and disrepair. Those need to be revived, some of them are, some by private sector investment. But it's an area where technological innovation is essential in Africa to solve some of the problems. The private sector has revolutionised the economy of Kenya through M-Pesa, through mobile money. That has generated maybe an additional 1% GDP growth a year. That could happen in other countries. Circumstances vary, but that kind of technological innovation can really help African economies develop. We can work together as Vodafone initiated M-Pesa and we have quite a vibrant science and technology partnership with South Africa, again which is a leader in this field. So that is another area where we just simply work together and we need to expand those areas. The last thing I'll say, given these three areas where we've got to look afresh at how we manage this, we've got to have the structures right for that. The joint Africa EU strategy has a rather rigid, formal, heavy bureaucratic structure for this. In fact, the relationship is changing and it's changing in dynamic ways that are not contained within that. Particularly on security issues, it's happening all the time through direct relations between the African Union Peace and Security, Political Security Committee and the PSC in the EU, and the relations between the EAS and the African Union Commission. That's where it's happening, so let's not try and shovel that into some formal structure. Let's accept that we should work where things are working, we build on that. Don't try and duplicate or channel in unstructured ways, and we need therefore to have a dynamic look at the structure we need for this relationship, so that it's actually going with the grain of change and not just trying to impose something on it. That will then, I think, help us achieve a healthier political balance in the relationship, because people will see it exists where it is of value, and the ways that we work together deliver that value to the people of Europe and the people of Africa. That's the fresh look that I want to have. I'm optimistic about the future of Africa. It has been through a remarkably fast period of social and political and economic change over the last 50 years. I think that speed of change is going to, if anything, accelerate, and it doesn't mean that it will just become increasingly stable everywhere. It's more complex than that. But the direction of change is increasingly in the right way. We look at countries that we considered complete lost causes 10 years ago, Liberia, Sierra Leone. Both have just had elections, which, while not perfect, were peaceful. They are beginning to make inroads into tackling the huge development challenges of these countries. Others are further down the track. We have to focus our attention where the challenges are greatest. Those are the crisis areas. But we need to make sure that we solve those in a way that will lead to sustainable solutions. On that basis, I'll end my remarks. Thank you very much for listening and look forward to your questions.