FfD and children
Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown MP
EVERY DAY this year, 30,000 children will lose the fight they are waging for life. Seven million children will perish before reaching their first birthday, and over ten million will die before the age of 5. Of those children winning their fight for survival, 113 million have no access to primary education, 60% of them girls. Millions more do not complete the five years of schooling needed to develop the basic literacy and math skills that would last them a lifetime.
This is the face of global poverty today. It is an affront to our basic belief in the equal worth and inherent potential of every human life. It is a challenge to the values at the core of our character.
Ensuring a better future for the world's children means not only putting the needs of the young and the poor at the centre of social policy, but also at the centre of financial decision-making, economic planning and international diplomatic action.
Our starting point for action is the United Nations development goal to halve the proportion of people living in poverty by 2015, including
1. Reducing by two-thirds infant and child mortality rates;
2. Ensuring that all children complete five years of good quality basic education; and
3. Closing the
gender gap between boys and girls at all levels of education.
International Concensus
But simply setting targets is not enough. Too often, the world has set
development goals and failed to meet them. That is why we must build an
international consensus amongst governments, NGOS, multilateral institutions and
the business sector and demand new and concrete commitments from all. We must
all be ready to reshape our policies, adjust our expenditure, and refashion our
priorities so that the actions of each of us make possible the attainment of the
goals set by all of us.
In particular, there are two areas on which action is imperative: health and
education.
A child's health should not be determined by a family's-or a country's-wealth.
We well know the human and economic costs of poor health and infectious disease
in developing countries. In the developing world, 150 million children are
underweight, with their mental health and physical development at severe risk.
Diseases like malaria and tuberculosis kill millions of children each year; in
South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe, half of all I 5-year-olds are expected to
die of Al DS.
Where developing countries have adopted strategies to tackle these problems,
they have yielded positive results. And there is more that they can do to reduce
disease and despair. Yet there is also a natural limit imposed by their ailing
economies. So it is vital that developed countries take action, and take action
together.
Unique partnership
In the UK and elsewhere, new tax incentives have been created to accelerate
research on diseases like HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria. In addition, the UK is
leading in the development -with the United Nations, other governments,
international agencies and foundations-of a unique partnership: a Global Health
Fund to mobilise resources for the prevention, management and care of HIV/AIDS,
TB and malaria. The UK is contributing US$200 million to the fund, and globally
the total of commitments already exceeds US$1.8 billion.
But it is essential that pharmaceutical companies join us, responding to the
challenge we face by developing and delivering affordable treatments for the
world's poor. Quite simply, we cannot save lives and raise hopes without their
commitment.
We know that education-and especially
girls' education-is a precondition of both personal and national progress.
It is the very best antipoverty strategy, the best economic development
programme.
Progress is being made. In the past decade, primary enrolments have
increased at twice the rate of the 1980s.But the challenge remains great.
Almost half of all African children and one-quarter of those in Southeast
Asia are being denied a basic education. Public expenditure per pupil in the
19 least developed countries is less than US$40, compared with US$200 per
pupil in developing countries, and US$5,300 in more advanced economies. So
again it is vital that developed countries take action together.
Universal primary education
Action must begin with aid. Since 1997, the UK has increased its commitments
on education by US$850 million. And this year-in Her Majesty the Queen's
jubilee year-we will create a fund to speed the introduction of universal
primary education in the Commonwealth.
But no aid budget, and no one nation, can achieve enough on its own. The
cost of meeting our targets is not huge-recent studies estimate that the
additional cost of achieving universal primary education could be in the
region of US$ I 0 billion a year-and the effect of these additional
resources would be dramatic. Developed countries must work together to
mobilise additional resources to fill the funding gap that amounts to less
than one quarter of one percent of the OECD countries' combined GDP
Similarly, developing countries must reprioritise their own budgets to meet
part of the funding gap and ensure long-term sustainability. We must
recognise the scale of the challenge we face and, working together, respond
on an equal scale.
We know that education is the best antipoverty strategy,- the best
economic development programme.
The Millennium Summit in September 2000 brought together more world leaders
than ever before, and sought to find common ground must now identify the
concrete steps for progress on development. We necessary to finance the
achievement of our development goals, recognising that this will require a
coherent approach involving a number of elements:
Faster, wider and deeper debt relief so that money paid by the
poorest countries for debt today can be money spent on education and
health tomorrow;
Increased and untied aid commitments;
Growth through trade, as one of the best means of lifting people up;
* Increased flows of FDI and improvements in the environment for
private capital, especially in low-income countries;
Community-driven poverty reduction strategies at the heart of
economic policy in developing countries;
Increased domestic saving, investment and entrepreneurship in
developing counties; improving the access of the poor-particularly
women-to land, property and credit markets; and
A stronger voice for developing countries in the international
system, by sustained capacity building on an
institution-by-institution basis.
Much-needed progress
It is critical that the UN Financing for Development conference to be held
in Monterrey, Mexico, in March 2002, achieves a successful outcome-and makes
much needed progress in mobilising the resources that are essential to
meeting our shared development goals.
It is a vital test of our progress that a mother in sub-Saharan Africa will give birth without transmitting HIV to her child, and will herself live long enough to nurture the child; that a child in South Asia will have sustenance and shelter; and that a young man or woman will gain the tools and skills and education it will take not only to live, but to thrive, in the 21st century.[END]
