Global Policy Forum

By Gordon Brown

In Africa the struggle that matters is the struggle for survival. With 14 million men, women and children in sub-Saharan Africa facing desperate famine this month - and with only half of the urgently needed food aid available - today's crisis threatens to become tomorrow's calamity.

The African famine underscores an even more momentous challenge: whether the international community can join together to conquer the illiteracy, disease and poverty that are endemic in the developing world. Terrorism and weapons proliferation must be dealt with. But we must, at the same time, look beyond conflict toward a secure peace. A world where some live in plenty while half the human race lives on less than two dollars a day cannot, in the long run, be either just or stable.

Two years ago, the world agreed to the UN millennium development goals - ambitious targets to ensure that by 2015 every child has schooling; infant and maternal mortality is reduced; and poverty halved. But already we are in danger of falling short.

Consider the first of those goals: universal primary education. Today, more than 115 million children do not go to school - 80 million in Africa alone. Globally, 88 countries are projected to fail to meet our goal. Without new money and a new plan the world will, once again, have set goals in principle and then, in practice, failed to meet them - not because we were wrong-headed in our intentions, but because we have been half-hearted in our actions.

Today, Clare Short and I launch our detailed proposals for an international finance facility - a new mechanism to raise the money needed to address these injustices. Its central principle is straightforward and reciprocal: in return for anti-corruption measures and stable conditions for equitable and sustainable economic growth in developing countries, the developed world will raise aid from $50bn a year to $100bn - the sum needed if we are to meet the millennium development goals.

In financial terms, the need is as pressing as it is profound. To halve poverty, we must double aid. To place all school-aged children into school will require a fifth of the additional $50bn. To begin to win the battle for global health - including the fight against Aids - demands at least an additional $12bn.

The proposed facility is the best means of putting this funding on a stable footing for 2015 - leveraging long-term commitments from donor countries to secure additional finance from international capital markets. For poor countries the aid will be available when it is needed: now, in advance of 2015. Rich countries will have more than double that time - 30 years - to repay their pledges.

Funds from the facility will be committed by the rich countries, so poor countries will not accumulate new debt. Indeed, most of the additional aid raised by the facility should be in the form of grants - making disbursements not through new bureaucracy but through existing, effective bilateral and multilateral mechanisms.

Our proposed facility cannot exist, let alone succeed, if churches, faith groups, NGOs and business - as well as governments and international institutions - do not demand its creation. And to achieve that, we must not only convince governments to fund the facility but also persuade a sceptical world that finance for development will not be wasted.

Too often aid, donated for the best reasons, has brought the worst results: cash that lines the pockets of corrupt elites rather than food that lines the stomachs of the starving. Too often the world has seen aid as recompense for the injuries of the past and not, as it must become, investment in our shared future. So by insisting on tough conditionality - on corruption-free regimes that pursue stable, equitable and sustainable economic growth, and agree to international monitoring of their poverty reduction plans - the success of aid will be measured not in pounds spent by donors, but in the rates of growth and poverty reduction achieved by recipients.

Throughout the developing world, promise sits side by side with the perils of disease, war and desperate poverty. Relieving these conditions is not just in the interest of the afflicted; it is in all our interest. The poorest and most populous continents represent the world's next engine of economic growth - future consumers and producers with enormous potential purchasing power essential to the long-term growth of industry and trade.

So now is the time - for reasons of justice, altruism and simple enlightened self-interest - for an unprecedented act of statesmanship by the world's richest countries. Every bit as much as the poorest, we stand to gain in a world more united, more just and more prosperous - a world that grows together, rather than apart.

Gordon Brown is chancellor of the exchequer

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