Cape Town — In the shadow of Table Mountain and in the middle of the Southern Hemisphere’s winter, the G20 Interfaith Forum convened its flagship gathering August 10–14 at the Westin Hotel, drawing religious leaders, policy experts and civil-society advocates to a week of panels, workshops and closed-door conversations aimed at turning moral imperatives into policy proposals. The theme—“Ubuntu in Action: Focus on Vulnerable Communities”—echoed South Africa’s G20 presidency motto of “Solidarity, Equality, Sustainability,” and set a pragmatic tone: less rhetoric, more implementation.
Organizers positioned the forum—known as IF20—not as a theological colloquium but as a “network of networks” meant to feed grounded recommendations into the official G20 process later this year. Since 2014, IF20 has followed the rotating G20 host, building a parallel track where faith-linked institutions compare notes with academics, development professionals, and officials. Its concept note for Cape Town was explicit: the target was the lives of people left behind by compounding crises, from stalled progress on the Sustainable Development Goals to fiscal distress that chokes off basic services.
Turnout was sizable by interfaith-policy standards. Local media and faith outlets reported more than 500 attendees, a mix that included clerics, NGO executives, scholars, philanthropies, and a cross-section of African civic leaders. Plenary speakers ranged from the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, Thabo Makgoba, to senior figures of the Bahá’í International Community and the South African Council of Churches, with participation by regional leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
From the opening session, the agenda mapped closely to five priorities the forum said it would carry to G20 sherpas: food security and poverty; economic and financial action, including sovereign debt and climate finance; addressing interreligious tensions through education (and, notably, ethics of artificial intelligence); migration and modern slavery; and disaster preparedness and resilience. That list framed three days of plenaries and more than 30 breakouts, each mixing global outlooks with South African case studies.
On finance and debt, a recurring refrain was that budgets are moral documents—and that the G20 can do more to make debt workouts faster and climate finance more accessible. Representatives from multilaterals, faith-based coalitions and the Jubilee network pressed the case that fiscal stress in many African states now undercuts everything from food programs to jobs and health systems. The program paired policy hands with clergy and advocates who have seen the downstream effects in parishes, mosques and clinics.
Hunger—and the politics around it—occupied an equally large share of time. Speakers tied the forum’s interventions to the “Global Alliance against Hunger” launched under Brazil’s 2024 presidency, arguing that religious communities, because of their geographic reach and trust capital, are essential partners for scaling nutrition, school meals and local agriculture. The forum’s working documents were blunt: food security is not merely an emergency-relief issue but a structural one entwined with inequality.
Education as social glue surfaced in sessions on religious literacy and the fight against disinformation. Organizers highlighted cross-cultural religious literacy curricula and the child-focused programs of groups such as Arigatou International. Unusually for a faith-policy space, the conference gave AI its own dedicated track—“The AI Revolution: Ethics and Action”—to discuss speech amplification, bias and the practical guardrails faith and civic actors might demand of platforms and developers.
Migration and trafficking, long-standing IF20 concerns, were treated not as abstractions but as operational headaches that require coordination across borders and sectors. Panelists stressed the dual imperative of hospitality and protection—assisting people in flight while strengthening detection and prosecution of organized exploitation. Several sessions drilled into service delivery: identification of vulnerable minors, referral pathways for survivors, and cooperation with municipal authorities.
Disaster readiness was framed as a trust problem as much as a logistics one. With memories of the pandemic still fresh, practitioners argued that rebuilding confidence in public health and emergency systems hinges on institutions people already rely on—faith networks among them. Here, too, the conversation kept circling back to financing and capacity: who pays for preparedness, and how local responders can be equipped before—not after—the next flood or fire.
The program itself revealed how deliberately the organizers blended symbolic and technical elements. After an interfaith invocation that included African Traditional Religion, Rastafari and Sikh prayers, the forum moved quickly to sessions with wonky titles and measurable targets. The hunger plenary listed UN country coordinators and food-security researchers alongside pastors and lay leaders. An afternoon sequence on corruption and governance paired Brazilian legal scholars with South African anti-graft campaigners. Even the AI ethics room ran on a mix of bishops’ secretaries-general and global CIOs.
If there was a single word that threaded through the week, it was Ubuntu—“I am because we are”—treated less as an aphorism than a method. The forum’s main page and press materials framed Ubuntu as the moral architecture for the South African presidency’s triad of solidarity, equality and sustainability. In practice, that meant the panels kept returning to equity: Who benefits? Who is left out? What does success look like for the most vulnerable?
The United Religions Initiative (URI), one of the world’s broadest interfaith networks, was conspicuous across the program and side events. Two URI figures appeared on official panels: Grace Chilongo, a Malawian youth and environment advocate, joined a session on climate-linked conflict and youth resilience; and Sarah Oliver, URI’s Global Learning and Action Coordinator, spoke in a discussion on women’s roles in peacebuilding and community resilience. Youth programming also underscored URI’s footprint: ACWAY’s G20 Youth Interfaith Forum, which ran alongside IF20, listed collaboration with URI among its sponsors and partners. Separately, Ambassador Mussie Hailu, URI’s regional director for Africa, took part in associated IF20 activities this year and joined local interfaith programming in Cape Town during the week of the forum.
The youth track was more than a parallel conference. ACWAY’s program described itself as “Leading with Ubuntu,” with practical labs on storytelling, mediation and project design; the point, organizers said, was to move next-generation leaders from dialogue to deliverables. That youth presence spilled into the main forum: fellows shared panels with ministers, and several moderators made a point of redirecting Q&A to younger hands. The symbolism was intentional—and strategic.
What emerges from the documents posted around the forum is not a single communiqué but a set of “priority areas” and an “Appeal” aimed at G20 sherpas and social-summit tracks: lock in country-level action on hunger; repair the global debt architecture with attention to climate and service delivery; scale religious-literacy programming to defuse sectarian tensions; treat trafficking as a transnational systems problem; and fund preparedness the way we fund response. The language is less sweeping than in past interfaith conclaves; it reads like it was written to be read in a finance ministry.
To skeptics, the interfaith ecosystem can look like a permanent conference circuit. The forum’s leaders seem aware of the critique. Their site now features not only plenary videos and photo galleries but also a continuously updated set of policy briefs, and it tracks links to G20 working groups on health, anti-corruption and climate. The hope is that the same broad coalition that shows up for invocations can also sustain patient, technical work over months—the timescale on which summit commitments are translated into budgets and programs.
South Africa’s context lent the week a distinctive cadence. Sessions drew on local experience—church-run hunger relief, Muslim and Jewish social-service collaborations, Rastafari and African spiritual traditions—and then scaled those examples outward to continental agendas like the African Union’s Agenda 2063. At the edges of the formal program, city offices and universities hosted conversations on how to build social cohesion in neighborhoods where faith groups already act as conveners. If the forum had a signature move, it was to start local and argue upward.
Whether any of this will move the needle in November, when G20 leaders meet, is unknowable. But the forum’s theory of change is clear: in an era of distrust, faith communities often have the last mile of legitimacy—and, therefore, a special responsibility. The measure of success, according to the “Appeal,” will be whether the vulnerable are meaningfully centered in spending and policy. That, in different words, is Ubuntu applied to governance.
If the week in Cape Town signaled anything, it was a shift from interfaith as symbolism to interfaith as infrastructure: using the moral vocabulary of traditions to convene, and the technical vocabulary of policy to deliver. The next test arrives quickly. The forum’s organizers say they will feed their recommendations into G20 social-summit channels and sherpa tracks in the coming weeks. For now, they leave behind a proposition and a challenge: that solidarity can be audited, and that leaving no one behind is a line item, not a slogan.
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First published in this link of The European Times.
