We’ve all heard the adage that if you say something often enough, it becomes true.
Well, recently some parts of the media seem to have adopted this approach to trashing foreign aid, saying aid doesn’t work, and the public don’t want it.
This is dangerous. It’s dangerous because it’s wrong, and because could cost people their lives.
It’s wrong because aid can and is making a huge difference. Millions of lives saved by the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria in the last decade, 4 million lives that could be saved in the next 5 years by the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation, 40 million more kids going to school than a decade ago.
It’s wrong because the public, when they hear these facts and see personal stories of transformation, get on board. The huge sums raised by charities are increasingly driven by such positive stories of progress. Comic Relief raised more than ever in 2011, and the public’s response to the East Africa famine was unprecedented.
The cynics in the media say that they public want foreign aid from the government cut – but they always forget to finish the sentence. They want it cut from what they think it is, anywhere from 15 to 25% of government spending, to 5 or 10%. Aid spending in the UK, USA, Australia, Canada or New Zealand is around 1% of government spending – a fraction of what people think it is, and a fraction of what people want it to be.
The danger in all of this is that these myths, left unchallenged, will have a real impact on the lives of the world’s poor.
When the media misreport on aid – saying that it doesn’t work and people don’t want it, and the public start to believe it. Members of the public repeat what they read in the papers to MPs, who in turn start to think that the public wants less aid. The media report on MP concerns over aid based on their own reports, and put pressure on the government to spend less.
The government spends less – cutting funding to life-saving interventions like vaccines for some of the world’s poorest children, reducing money set aside to respond to emergencies like last year’s famine, and the world’s poorest suffer.
As a movement of people who care about fighting extreme poverty, we cannot accept the demand of some media editors to balance our budget on the back’s of the world’s poor.
It’s a demand that’s based on untruth and misinformation, and we have to stand up and do something about it.
We need to take the proof that aid works out to our communities, and we need to show our politicians and media the full story when it comes to aid and development.
We need to argue that aid can work wonders – when it’s spent well. We have to acknowledge that aid isn’t always spent well, that corruption is an issue, and that we need to ask tough questions about value for money and impact – and that these are issues we should debate, not excuses to avoid giving aid.
We should be proud that our government has so far stood up the negative press, and kept their promises to the world’s poor and us on foreign aid. But we can’t expect them to withstand the barrage without more support from us.
As I write this, I’m on a train back from Plymouth in the south-west of England, having just spoken with a group of students about exactly this. They got it, as have people and communities all over the country. At the Global Poverty Project, we’ve spoken face to face with more than 100,000 people in the last two years, and the lesson we’ve learnt is clear:
Take the facts and the stories out to people, suggest a course of action, and they can do the rest.
“Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Global Poverty Project will begin its 1.4 Billion Reasons 2012 tour across the United States in February. We’re traversing the country in 18 weeks across 25 states with 66 presentations booked and counting. There are four of us on the trip and the office is bubbling with excitement as anticipation mounts for when we shotgun out of New York state and zip down to the US south for our first cluster of presentations.
We can hear Meg, our main speaker and former Peace Corp volunteer in Malawi, practicing the text of the presentation in the office next-door. As she rehearses, interjecting anecdotes about Malawi and her experience as a local teacher, we all can’t help but get distracted from our work as we listen. Living 14 hours outside the capital city of Lilongwe, she taught Secondary School in a country where over 40 per cent of the population lives on less that $2 a day.
Sometimes her stories are funny: Malawi fashion revolves around castoff T-shirts with inappropriate or erroneous messaging, including one announcing “Indianapolis Colts, 2010 Super Bowl Champions” (the New Orleans Saints were the real winners). But other times they are heartbreaking: she remembers girls being harassed as they attempted to go to school, corruption diverting critical school funds, and an impoverished security guard being fired for failing to protect a female student.
Dan, our logistics coordinator, sits in the corner desk of the office. He’s in charge of booking presentations and is the resident scheduling expert. Balancing 66 presentations, some in unfamiliar or isolated locations, he’s managed to create a cohesive route winding across highways and back country roads. A former Washington, DC resident, he’s developed USAID agricultural programs in East Africa and South Asia. He’s also an expert at finding engaging ways for us to present, including a spot at the SXSW Music Festival in Austin, Texas.
Tyler, our videographer, is busy ordering equipment and planning his camera shots. He’s organizing fascinating videos and interviews, focusing on organizations like Heifer International, whose innovative microfinance model includes donating animals to developing countries. Their headquarters are at a sprawling ranch in Arkansas, where we will be visiting for a few days. Tyler has documented everything from development in Africa to hiking in Montana, and he’ll be making videos following every leg of the tour.
As we traverse from one state to the next, we’ll be sharing the mission of the Global Poverty Project: to end extreme poverty within a generation, specifically focusing on preventable child deaths. It’s an ambitious goal for a pressing issue: about 21,000 children under the age of five –15 each minute – die every day. These deaths are preventable with access to vaccines, adequate sanitation, and maternal health care.
From February to May, we’ll present engaging personal stories and debunk myths about foreign aid which have co-opted U.S. dialogue on issues like preventable child deaths. In innumerable polls, Americans overwhelmingly believe that the U.S. government spends a larger portion of the total federal budget on foreign aid than defense spending, Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, or infrastructure. The truth? The U.S. spends less than 1% of the federal budget on foreign aid.
Additionally, many believe that increased foreign aid is a cause championed by Democrat Presidents and representatives. Yet the U.S. presidents that have historically appropriated the largest amounts of aid are Dwight D. Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush, who in 2003 gave the largest amount in foreign aid in three decades. All of the largest spenders were Republican.
We’ll be visiting states with vastly different political and social conceptions. We imagine that presentations in Butte, Montana will bring a different assortment of questions than those garnered from Washington, DC or New York City, NY. Or maybe they’ll be the same. Either way, we hope to build a movement where issues of poverty, and especially child mortality, can be discussed in any community.
The study estimates over 1.2 million lives were lost to malaria in 2010, almost twice the estimates used by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in its most recent malaria report. Whilst both approaches maintain that the majority of lives lost to malaria are in Africa – which bears 91% of all deaths – and amongst young children. The difference in the IHME’s data is the assumption that higher numbers of older children and adults in heavy-burden malaria areas are dying from the disease.
Whilst the total numbers may be different, “however you look at it, far too many people are dying from malaria,” Professor David Schellenberg, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine told the BBC.
But there is good news, as Annemarie Meyer, Programme and Policy Manager at Malaria No More UK explains: “the main trends reported by both the IHME and WHO reports highlight that international efforts to fight malaria are working with a consistent and significant reduction in malaria deaths since 2004. This progress is thanks to investments in efforts to prevent, diagnose and treat malaria, we need to continue to press for more resources to sustain these gains and save more lives.”
Malaria No More UK spoke to a number of experts ahead of the publication of the study. Many of our own policy advisors have also been involved in reviewing and responding to the study data. It is important to note that global malaria data relies on estimates, as Lancet editor Richard Horton pointed out to the BBC this morning, “Right now we don’t actually have any reliable primary numbers for malaria deaths in some of the most malarious regions of the world, so what numbers we have come from estimates.”
Better disease diagnosis and surveillance is needed, ultimately, to remove the reliance on data modeling like these. As Professor David Schellenberg also told the BBC “The introduction of rapid diagnostic tests for malaria, recommended by the WHO in 2010 and increasingly available in endemic countries, affords an unprecedented opportunity to take the guesswork out of malaria diagnosis and to improve the reliability of information.”
Annemarie Meyer adds, “the WHO already recommends that essential malaria prevention, diagnosis and treatment should be made available to both adults and children: we all agree that efforts need be increased to reach everyone at risk.”
It is critically important to sustaining and increasing efforts to combat this deadly disease. The IHME study’s authors emphasised the importance of sustaining and increasing efforts to combat malaria, and recognised the contribution of The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria in achieving success so far. With international financing for malaria, and particularly funding for the Global Fund facing significant shortfalls in meeting the need, it is more important than ever to increase our efforts to sustain international support.
Malaria No More UK, along with the Global Poverty Project and a host of other organisations focussed on tackling HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria have been calling for increased funding for The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB
and Malaria. We have been asking people to lend their voice to this campaign: to sign a petition and write to their MP to help persuade the British government to announce an increase in financial support for the Fund.
Join our campaign with the Global Poverty Project to help ‘Fund The Fund’ by adding your name to the petition on the right or sending a letter to your MP
Following on from our recent series of posts about food security, hunger and waste, this is a guest post from Martin Bowman, founder of Bexley/Lewisham/Dartford Food Not Bombs, on how food waste in developed countries is contributing to global food insecurity.
‘Over half of the food produced today is lost, wasted or discarded as a result of inefficiency in the human-managed food chain.’
- Achim Steiner, Executive director of UNEP (United Nations Environmental Programme)
The world is over-crowded – this is the message that resounds through the media. This was especially so in 2011, the year the world’s population passed 7 billion, which caused a worldwide panic – there is not enough to go round! One UN report cried that farmers must produce 70% more food by 2050 to feed our swelling population, which is tipped to hit 9 billion by that point.
Many solutions have been proposed, most notably from the GM lobby, trying to present their patented, privatized food as the cure for the world’s ills, although this is highly questionable. Moreover, the World Food Programme budget for 2009 was US$6.7 billion. That year, the number of hungry people globally reached a record 1 billion, and the WFP argued that it needed an extra $3 billion to counter a downward trend in food aid and growing need. Evidence is also mounting for the link between hunger, violence and conflict.
In short, we are bombarded with images of scarcity. But this is wrong. For we live in a world of unparalleled abundance.
Here is a list of facts which are the antidote to “scarcity thinking”:
• All the world's nearly one billion hungry people could be lifted out of malnourishment on less than a quarter of the food that is wasted in the US, UK and Europe.
• The irrigation water used globally to grow food that is wasted would be enough for the domestic needs (at 200 litres per person per day) of 9 billion people - the number expected on the planet by 2050.
• If we planted trees on land currently used to grow unnecessary surplus and wasted food, this would offset a theoretical maximum of 100% of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. 10% of rich countries' greenhouse gas emissions come from growing food that is never eaten.
Tristram Stuart is one of a growing vanguard of food waste campaigners who have emerged in the past few years, which now includes Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, This Is Rubbish, and Friends of the Earth. Their message is simple: throwing way food is damaging to people and the planet. That food (and the resources used to produce it) could be put to better use.
Food prices are also at record highs, which have pushed millions into malnutrition over the past few years. What is the cause of this which is constantly referred to in the press? Scarcity. Hence, the frequent explanation: that crops failures in countries such as Australia contributed to the various price rises, pushing up food prices globally. Other reasons for the record highs are the demand for biofuels and commodity speculation by investment banks and hedge funds. Food wastage is rarely mentioned, and yet throwing 30-50% of the world’s food away puts massive strain on the global food supply, driving prices up.
What is the solution? Food waste needs its own “reduce, reuse, recycle”. This is represented in the simple food waste flow chart – reduce (wasting less will relax the strain on the global food supply), feed to people in need (providing a much needed safety net, especially in the context the financial crisis and austerity programmes), feed to livestock (pigswill can help reduce the West’s reliance on soy, much of which comes from deforested land in Brazil), compost (reduces the need for energy intensive fertilizer), and finally, as a last resort, disposal. For an inspiring list of companies dealing with these different levels of food waste, click here:
If you feel inspired to join the growing food waste movement, here are some great campaigns to get involved with:
• Feeding the 5,000 Pledge: Pledge to reduce your food waste, and call on businesses to do the same.
• Hugh’s Fish Fight: Call for reforms to EU fishery policy, to stop half of the fish caught in the North Sea being discarded.
• Friends of the Earth’s “Feed farm animals, not incinerators” campaign: Call for food waste and pigswill to replace imported animal feeds, often soy grown on deforested land.
• WDM’s Food Speculation campaign: Call for banks to stop betting on food prices, which makes them more volatile and drives them up.
You can also find out more about Food Not Bombs from their facebook page here.
Today we launch the 2012 Live Below the Line campaign. Braving the freezing conditions, over 40 Live Below the Line supporters took to Piccadilly Circus and joined Harry Potter star Bonnie Wright at a special dinner party with a difference. Sat ready for an elegant dinner, volunteers were instead treated to a single raw vegetable to highlight the lack of choice available to the 1.4 billion people living off less than £1 per day around the world.
The 2012 campaign is being led by six very influential UK charity partners, including UNICEF, Salvation Army, Christian Aid, RESULTS UK, Restless Development and Malaria No More UK. Over the next six months, Live Below the Line will be challenging thousands of participants who for 5 days will have £5 for all their food and drink, raising £500,000 for anti-poverty initiatives around the globe.
You can pre-register your interest using the form below or find out more here.
Join me in writing to your local MP to say thanks for the aid they’re giving, and urge them to keep up the good work by helping to save 3 million more lives from malaria.
.jpg)
.png)
Today we launch the 2012 Live Below the Line campaign. Braving the freezing conditions, over 40 Live Below the Line supporters took to Piccadilly Circus and joined Harry Potter star Bonnie Wright at a special dinner party with a difference. Sat ready for an elegant dinner, volunteers were instead treated to a single raw vegetable to highlight the lack of choice available to the 1.4 billion people living off less than £1 per day around the world.
