What was Tony Blair hoping to achieve for Africa with his visit to George Bush in Washington?
Britain holds the chair of the G8 group of nations: the UK, the US, France, Italy, Germany, Canada, Russia and Japan. The prime minister and the chancellor, Gordon Brown, want to use the year-long presidency to make progress in three areas - debt relief, aid and trade.

Why was the visit needed?
Progress has been much slower than the UK would have liked. Mr Blair and Mr Brown want to see the debts owed by the poorest countries to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the African Development Bank written off, aid from western countries doubled from $50bn (around £27bn) to $100bn a year, and western markets opened up to goods from Africa. The way things look, Britain will fall short of fulfilling this ambitious agenda.

Is the slow progress all down to the Americans?
No. Given its size, the US is vital to any deal, particularly when it comes to scaling up the world's aid effort. America falls well short of hitting the target set by the United Nations in 1970 for donating 0.7% of national income to aid, but George Bush has stepped up financial assistance and has a better record than his predecessor, Bill Clinton. Other G8 countries, many of them with severe financial problems, have found it convenient to hide behind the Americans while they have argued about debt relief and aid with the UK.

So what is actually going on with debt relief? Wasn't this all sorted by Jubilee 2000?
Poor countries owe debts to three sorts of creditors. They owe money to individual countries (bilateral debt), to institutions such as the World Bank and IMF (multilateral debt) and they owe money to the private sector. The debts that were written off as a result of the Jubilee 2000 campaign were the bilateral debts of poor countries who qualified for help under the heavily indebted poor country initiative (HIPC). They still owe large sums to the multilateral creditors.

How much?
That depends on your definition of poor. Campaign groups have identified more than 60 countries whose ability to hit the development goals for 2015 laid down by the United Nations - universal primary education, a halving of extreme poverty, and a two-thirds cut in infant mortality - is hampered by debt repayments. Between them they pay $10-11bn a year to multilateral creditors, and $39bn in total.

So will all that be written off as a result of the Bush-Blair deal?
Not by any means. The agreement applies to 18 countries who have received debt relief under the HIPC agreement. Between them, they pay around $1bn a year to the IMF, the World Bank and the African Development Bank. This deal does not apply to the IMF debts because the UK wants the IMF's stock of gold to be revalued in order to pay for the relief and the US doesn't. As a result, the total benefit to poor countries could be as low as $500m a year - about five days worth of debt payments.

There has been an argument about "additionality". What does that mean?
The Americans argued that debt relief should be paid for out of aid budgets. The UK said this was robbing Peter to pay Paul and would leave poor countries no better off. They said debt relief had to result in additional money. Mr Bush has conceded this point, but it is still unclear how much extra cash will be provided. The signs are that it will be a maximum of 50 cents for every dollar of debt relief.

How are things going on aid?
Slowly. Gordon Brown has a proposal for doubling aid called the international finance facility. It is a live-now-pay-later scheme under which governments would float their bonds on global markets to raise extra funds for development now and pay back those who bought the bonds in 15 years' time out of future aid budgets. The Americans have made it clear they won't agree to the IFF, and some of the European countries - particularly Germany - also have their doubts, despite public support.

So is Gleneagles destined to be a flop?
No, but it could fail to live up to the high expectations generated by the UK. There will be a deal on debt, and perhaps a limited deal on aid, but no full multilateral debt write-off and no doubling of financial assistance. And that's before the tricky negotiations on trade get into full swing ahead of a ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation in Hong Kong in December. They will be really tough.