While the London G20 Summit represented a step towards a more inclusive global governance system, further institutional reforms are badly needed to ensure the interests of low-income countries are adequately represented, according to national leaders and other participants gathered at this year’s World Economic Forum on Africa in Cape Town.

In particular, they urged the major industrialized countries to accept long-stalled changes in the governing structures of the IMF and the World Bank.

“A critical lesson from the current crisis is the need for a transformed global financial system,” Jacob Zuma, President of South Africa, said in his opening address. Reform of the so-called Bretton Woods institutions, he added, would “reflect changing economic realities and provide a voice for emerging and developing countries.”

The G20, Zuma noted, endorsed such reforms – which would increase the voting power of the lesser developed countries – in its communiqué following the London Summit. Now, he said, African and other developing world leaders will need to carefully monitor progress towards that goal, as well as the other objectives laid out in the communiqué, such as pledges from the major developed countries to meet their millennium development goals, shun additional protectionist measures and increase IMF and World Bank lending resources.

Read more about the opening session of the World Economic Forum on Africa here.