Having spent much of my childhood in Ghana, alleviating poverty in Africa has always been an issue close to my heart. It is also a thread that has run throughout my political career, from working to develop the International Finance Facility for Immunisation at the Treasury, to helping to draft the Africa Commission Report and serving as the UK’s High Commissioner to South Africa. In each role I have advocated strongly for both increasing and improving aid and ensuring that the UK continues to play a key, driving role in international development policy.
1997 proved a watershed year for the UK’s attitude to international development. In the Labour party we agreed that we had a moral obligation to extend our party’s commitment to fairness and to end poverty in the developing world. Our manifesto reaffirmed Labour’s commitment to the UN’s 0.7 per cent aid target and took the landmark step of separating international development policy from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Direction on the issue came directly from the party leadership with both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, energetic and committed advocates for eradicating global poverty and realising global health goals.
In government we saw development as about more than a simple handout, it was an investment for our future. We recognised that we live in a globalised and interdependent world, with trade partners across the globe. By supporting poverty alleviation, public health and disease prevention programmes we were helping to create the healthy, economically vibrant and prosperous communities that would become our trading partners of the future. International development is one area where successive governments have got it right with the coalition largely continuing the good work begun under Labour. These policies have been underpinned by an economic rigour which is appropriate for our current economic climate, with aid programmes expected to demonstrate that they are cost-efficient, effective and targeted to the areas of greatest need. This, we can all agree, is the correct approach.
With this in mind, I spent the week of last year’s autumn statement in Tanzania at a global health conference hosted by the Tanzanian ministry of health and in partnership with the GAVI Alliance. While Westminster was abuzz with news of the autumn statement, I was in the foothills of Kilimanjaro meeting the very children whose future the UK was helping to secure. It was a relief therefore that despite the gloomy economic prognosis, the chancellor remained committed to spending 0.7 per cent of GNI on aid from 2013.
My visit to Tanzania had a dual purpose. First, it was to meet with the more than 600 parliamentarians, global health leaders, technical experts and civil society representatives from around the world to foster greater political will and to explore ways to accelerate results, innovation, sustainability and equity in the field of immunisation. Second, it was about seeing how UK taxpayers’ money is being spent on the ground. UK funding is making a vital contribution to ensuring that effective vaccines are available to people throughout Tanzania. The cost of preventable disease, not just in human terms but in its destructive impact on overall health costs and wasted economic potential, is glaringly obvious in a country where women will walk miles with their babies on their backs to ensure a healthy life for a child. The people I met were extremely grateful for this help and know well the important role that the UK is playing in supporting these projects.
The visit was also the second time last year that I had the privilege of seeing GAVI in action. In April, I returned to Ghana to witness the roll-out of vaccines to protect against pneumonia and diarrhoeal disease, the two leading killers of children in the developing world. Pneumonia is responsible for 1.2 million child deaths and 450,000 child deaths are due to diarrhoeal disease every year. GAVI, through its unique market-shaping approach, allow developing world countries to purchase effective vaccines against some of the world’s most deadly diseases at a significantly reduced cost. GAVI’s results to date have been astonishing. Since 2000 they have immunised 370 million children and helped to save 5.5 million future deaths. Providing that current levels of support are sustained, GAVI estimate that they can vaccinate a further quarter of a billion children by 2015. The UK government was so impressed by GAVI’s results that in 2011 David Cameron committed a further £814m to support their work.
The ideas and initiatives developed by Labour to make international development a key policy priority can still be seen in DFID’s leading contribution to the effort to end global poverty and reduce childhood mortality through vaccinating against preventable diseases. Programmes like GAVI, which demonstrate results and prioritise cost-effective interventions and country ownership, should be used a model for all international development policy. Our work and thinking on the post 2015 Millennium Development Goals Agenda needs to reflect this and the importance of ensuring that the developing world sets its own priorities, with equitable outcomes whether in health or growth at their heart, rather than the top-down approach of too much development policy so common in the past. GAVI’s great strength is that it is a genuine partnership. The engagement of civil society is a real priority rather than simply tokenism and lip service. I remain convinced that developing world countries have a hugely significant role to play in efforts to rebuild and reshape the global economy in the wake of financial crisis and the moral obligation to support their development remains as true today as it was in 1997.
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Paul Boateng is former chief secretary to the Treasury and high commissioner to South Africa
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