STORY: EDITORS PLEASE NOTE: THIS VIDEO HAS BEEN UPDATED TO REFLECT THE SUMMIT STARTING ON SATURDAY.

** South Africa on Saturday began hosting the first G20 summit ever held on African soil.

:: Johannesburg, South Africa

But hopes for a strong declaration on climate and debt relief for developing nations are slim. Geopolitical tensions are high, and U.S. President Donald Trump is boycotting the meeting. 

Washington has rejected South Africa's agenda of promoting global solidarity and helping developing nations adapt to worsening climate shocks, transition to clean energy, and to ease debt burdens.

That may hamper the summit, but leaders could still find common ground. 

Here's Johanes Belle, Director of the Disaster Management & Education Training Centre for Africa, at the University of the Free State: 

"If they are not coming into the party, that is where the G20 may have some sort of a limping leg. But that does not mean the rest of the parties, the rest of 190-something countries in the world cannot come together and decide on how to move the planet forward."

South Africa's priorities include preparing for climate-induced disasters and mobilizing finance for clean energy transition; as Busispho Siyobi, Public Policy Researcher at Good Governance Africa says, with 600 million Africans lacking electricity it's about making sure they benefit from the global race for critical minerals.

"The real question now really goes around, how do we ensure that the people on the continent are benefiting from these minerals and how are they serving the current energy crises that we have respectively within the continent."

** The summit is being held in Soweto, a suburb of Johannesburg infamous under apartheid as a community for Black South Africans barred from living in the city itself.

:: Washington, D.C.

Even before President Trump returned to the White House, there were divisions among G20 members over sharing the cost of climate action. 

Trump further raised tensions with South Africa by repeating debunked claims about white South Africans being "slaughtered" and driven off their land.

Other absentees include Argentina's Javier Milei and China's Xi Jinping. But Trump's absence is not necessarily a bad thing, says, political analyst Piet Croucamp.

"Look, Trump not coming to South Africa may be the best thing that could happen to the G20. Imagine him or even JD Vance getting up on the stage here and doing what Vance has done in Europe when he arrived there and insulted each and every foreign leader sitting in that room. And that's exactly what they would have done coming here. It would have been chaos".

** The summit finishes on Sunday.

And with the U.S. scheduled to chair the next G20 Summit, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa quipped he would hand the G20 presidency "to an empty chair."