The implementation of TICAD V Action Plan and Declaration are among the issues on their table as they meet in Yaounde from May 4-5, 2014. Four major items will feature in the very first Fifth Tokyo International Conference for African Development (TICAD V) Ministerial Conference that opens at the Yaounde Conference Centre, May 04.

Ministers from African countries, representatives of the African Union Commission, the United Nations, the United Nations Development Program, the World Bank, and other international partners will discuss among others, the implementation of the action plan and declaration that emerged from the TICAD V in Yokohama, June 03, 2013.

Agriculture, food and nutrition security as well as issues concerning the empowering of the woman will equally be tackled. Participants are expected to go a step forward by drawing up a post-2015 Development Agenda.

The Yaounde conference which is the first in the TICAD process to hold in the Central African sub region is expected to strengthen and develop the partnership between Africa and Japan with a special focus on the continent’s needs, notably agriculture and getting women into the mainstream of development.

The conference is another enabling arena for Japan to demonstrate its commitment as expressed in the TICAD V concluding documents and visit the Central African sub region which the country’s Prime Minister missed in his African visit last January.

The Yaounde confab is another occasion for the visiting Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs, Kishida Fumio to strengthen bilateral relationship and cooperation between Japan and Cameroon through a series of meetings with Cameroon’s political and administrative officials. Japan established diplomatic relations with Cameroon since 1960 and opened its embassy in Yaounde in 1991.

By Lukong Pius Nyuylime