Chapter 5 – Project Our Global Influence 57 5.67 We are committed to Africa’s development. We will continue to make substantial investments to promote greater economic growth and poverty reduction. We will work closely with African countries and institutions, as well as with development partners including the US and France. 5.68 The UK will continue to play a leadership role in helping to tackle the threat of terrorism to the region. In Somalia, we work closely with our partners to increase their capacity to combat terrorism, including through training security forces and boosting aviation security. We also command the EU’s counter-piracy operation in the region. We will seek to strengthen international support to the Nigerian authorities to tackle terrorism. We are expanding our British Military Advisory and Training Team and increasing the number of Short Term Training Teams to help deliver more training and capacity building support to the Nigerian Armed Forces. In Kenya, the British Peace Support Team assists the East Africa Standby Force and trains Kenyan, Ethiopian and Ugandan forces in regional peacekeeping, as well as coordinating the UK military contribution to Somalia. Our Armed Forces will continue to use training areas in Kenya, supported by the British Army Training Unit Kenya. With South Africa, the British Peace Support Team assists the Southern Africa Development Community forces including in Malawi and Zambia and supports military reform in South Africa. 5.69 We have strengthened our commitment to international peacekeeping in Africa, and will make new deployments to UN missions in Somalia and South Sudan. We will work with African partners to help to ensure that the lessons of the Ebola outbreak are learned, and local resilience is strengthened for the future. 5.70 The African Union (AU) has unique legitimacy as a pan-African institution. It has taken a leading role with the UN and EU in peacekeeping and peace enforcement in Somalia and the Central African Republic, and against Boko Haram, and is an important political player in Sudan and South Sudan. We work with the AU to promote progressive values, including on peacekeeping, conflict resolution, migration, governance and trade. This year we provided £30 million through the European Development Fund to the Africa Peace Facility. We will continue to work closely with the AU on building stability, and will increase our engagement on trade and development. Asia and the Pacific 5.71 The Asia-Pacific region has significant economic opportunities for the UK, and considerable influence on the future integrity and credibility of the rules-based international order. We will continue to work with like-minded partners in the region, including Japan, Australia, New Zealand and others to defend and protect our global shared interests, uphold the rules-based international order and to strengthen cooperation on settling international and regional disputes. 5.72 We are strengthening considerably our defence, political and diplomatic cooperation with Japan, our closest security partner in Asia, as they take an increasingly global outlook on security issues. We strongly support Japan’s bid to become a permanent member of an expanded United Nations Security Council, and support Japan taking a greater role in UN peacekeeping. We will build on our defence cooperation, based on successful operational cooperation including on counter-piracy in the Gulf of Aden and off Somalia. We will collaborate further, particularly on disaster relief operations and broader joint deployments both regionally and worldwide. We will continue to explore longer term opportunities for closer defence engagement and defence industrial collaboration. As the world’s third