Africa has expressed doubt over the capacity of developed nations to keep their financial commitments made during last year's Copenhagen summit to help poor countries deal with climate change.

"It's primordial to know whether the financial pledges will be kept. Doubts have been expressed and we have indications that these doubts are justified," Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi told the opening of an African Union meeting in Addis Ababa.

Meles said that at the next climate summit in Cancun, Mexico, in December, "we need to refine our strategies in concentrating especially on the implementation of the financial commitments of Copenhagen."

The Ethiopian leader is the chief negotiator appointed by the 53 member states of the African Union for all issues relating to climate change. Africa has decided that it wants a single voice to represent it during international meetings.

Meles was speaking at a meeting of representatives of the conference of 10 African heads of state and government on climate change, which the AU describes as a "forum tasked with drawing up African strategies and submitting concrete measures in accordance with the plan of action that came out of the Copenhagen conference" last December.

The leaders - from Algeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Libya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa and Uganda - are due to meet in July on the sidelines of the next AU summit in Uganda's capital Kampala.

The Copenhagen accord includes no binding objective on the reduction of greenhouse gases and in the current state of commitments by individual nations, would see global warming of 3 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, rather than the 2 degrees that was the initial target.

The accord provided for finance in the short term, by 2012, of 30 billion dollars (23.6 billion euros) for the most vulnerable countries to take measures to tackle climate change, with a mid-term goal of 100 billion dollars a year by 2020.