An annual meeting of social activists worldwide made no tangible achievements since it began in 2001, but has highlighted the importance of social issues, Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu said on Friday.
The World Social Forum (WSF), which was created as a challenge to the coinciding World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, brings together a conglomerate of activists and NGOs to discuss issues such as poverty, disease and trade, among others. The seventh forum begins in Nairobi on Saturday.
”There have been no tangible achievements,” said Tutu, who is in Kenya to attend the WSF. ”But most important is it has placed certain issues on the agenda.”
”When the Group of Eight countries sits down and says they are concerned about the United Nations’s Millennium Development Goals, part of that is surely due to education and campaigning that has surrounded the WSF,” he added.
About 100 000 delegates are expected to attend more than 1 000 workshops to debate everything from access to education, natural resources and gay rights.
Tutu is accompanying the All Africa Conference of Churches group to the WSF, and when asked how the group of clergymen would address the issue of gay rights, Tutu spoke candidly about his personal views.
”To penalise somebody for their sexual orientation is the same as what used to happen to black South Africans for something about which we could do nothing,” said Tutu, who led South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission following the fall of apartheid.
South Africa’s Parliament last year approved the legal status of gay marriages. The Anglican Church, to which Tutu belongs, has seen a split between its Western and African clergy over the acceptance of homosexuals in the church, with the former being more lenient.
This is the first WSF to be held in Africa, the world’s poorest continent, where more than half the population live on less than $1 a day. — Sapa-dpa