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19 November 2006

Speech by the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Stephen Timms MP, to the Oaktree Foundation on International Development and Education, Melbourne, Australia

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The G20 conference has just finished. I'm delighted to have this opportunity to address the Oaktree Foundation, which strikes me as a pretty remarkable institution. I congratulate you for putting education at the heart of development, and enthusing and mobilising a new generation.

It's the commitment of young people to tackling poverty which is perhaps the best encouragement that we are going to be able to do it. I was speaking on Friday at a business lunch about Make Poverty History. If you ask businesses who are involved why they are taking these issues seriously today, many will frankly say its because they have to if they are going to attract the very brightest young people to come and work for them, as they need to.

Twenty years ago, the brightest young people wanted to be assured they were going to maximise their earnings. Today, for many, that isn't enough. A lot of young people today want to be confident as well that, in their working lives, they are going to be able to contribute to solving the world's big problems. Companies are having to respond. It's a powerful lever for change, and I hope all of you will in your lives be at the forefront of demanding that organisations you are involved with will help achieve justice for the world's poor.

2005 was a momentous year - the Make Poverty History coalition, Live8 concerts, Gleneagles G8 summit and commitment of an extra US$ 50 billion a year in aid by 2010. Our challenge now is to turn momentum into delivery. I want to pay tribute to your efforts in helping drive this forward, because we have only just begun.

Oaktree can help the G20 Governments to build widespread public support to raise political awareness, to increase and maintain pressure on all Governments. It is critical that you do. It is your generation who will shape the future.

Half of the world's population is under 25 and the majority are in the developing world. Make Poverty History has provided a vision of that future -one where no one has to suffer extreme poverty, a vision where the ordinary rights we enjoy, like getting an education, are made available to not just a few, but to everybody.

Next year in Britain we mark 200 years since the abolition of the slave trade, following a huge campaign led in Parliament by William Wilberforce, the Member of Parliament for Hull. His diary contains an entry for Sunday 28 October 1787, when he was aged 28, one year after he had been converted to personal Christian faith: "God has set before me two great objects," he wrote, "the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners".

Twenty years later, in 1807, progress on the reformation of manners was patchy, but he had secured the legislation to abolish the slave trade. It was an extraordinary achievement, and literally one which changed the world. The world had never seen anything like that campaign. It was the start of popular, progressive politics. It came out of faith. It has been the model for mass campaigns ever since, right up to Make Poverty History.

We have seen progress against poverty. In 40 years, life expectancy in the developing world is up by a quarter. In 30 years, illiteracy has fallen by half. Since the mid 1980s, 400 million people have risen out of absolute poverty. We are beating polio, and smallpox has been beaten already.

But we need to be frank about the reality of what is happening:

  • The number living in poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa is going up, and big challenges remain in the South Pacific;
  • Half a million women die each year in pregnancy and childbirth;
  • Every day, 30,000 children die of preventable causes.

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On current progress, we will fall a very long way short of the Millennium Development Goals by 2015.

We need to do much better, and we can do much better. If countries work together. If they provide the resources the G8 all committed to last year. If people continue to demand more, through this organization and its counterparts around the world. Then we can break with the past and reach the goals on time.

Developing countries need ambitious, credible long term plans, and then to be able demand that donors like Britain, who have committed to provide the funding, step forward and deliver.

The UK has set out our commitment in our recent White Paper. Since 1997 we have increased our Department for International Development's budget by 140% in real terms, from £2.1 billion to £5.3 billion next year. Were using this rising aid budget to help countries to train teachers and doctors, build schools, buy drugs, provide clean water, and help farmers. We, like you, recognise education is the key to making change for the better happen.

Through improving education and healthcare, even those who are poorest today can look forward in the future to an escape from poverty, disease and illiteracy.

Education is key. The education millennium goal, of every child completing primary school by 2015, means they must be enrolled by 2010.

The more children who get a full education, the richer a country will be. In low-income countries, with each year of additional education, average earnings increase by 11 per cent. People who can read and write are in a position to start up businesses and make a livelihood for themselves and their families, and contribute to the well being of their community. And education helps combat diseases like HIV/AIDS, so it means developing countries benefit from a healthier workforce.

Providing the finance for universal education today will make for a better qualified, more productive, healthier and more prosperous population tomorrow. It will also be a population which can shoulder the burden of financing education for the next generation.

In Bangladesh last month, I visited a one-roomed school, a small tin hut, where twenty small, eager children were sitting on the floor and learning from their teacher. And they were the lucky ones - many of their peers can't go to school because they have to be out working. I announced during my visit that the UK would provide funding support for the Bangladesh Government in a ten-year plan for education, enabling it to take long-term decisions for the future.

Last April, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK, Gordon Brown, and our International Development Secretary, Hillary Benn, announced the UK will spend at least $15 billion on aid for education worldwide over the next decade, and that we will make 10 year agreements with developing countries to support their own plans for education.

In Singapore in September, 17 countries, led by Nigeria and Ghana, set out progress on their 10-year education plans. Fully implemented, the plans would ensure 25 million more children in education. We will work with other developing countries, in Asia and Africa, to support ambitious, long-term plans.

The gains from education are especially clear in the education of girls and the aim of equality for girls is in one of the MDGs. In Africa, Asia and Latin America, women with seven or more years of schooling had between two and three fewer children than women with three or less years of education.

Educated mothers are more likely to send their own children to school. Their children then do better at school than the children of unschooled parents. It's a virtuous cycle of development.

Some of you who have volunteered in the developing world will know that students sometimes walk miles to get to school. Books and basic learning materials are often in short supply. Children become discouraged.

Governments and their partners need to build new schools and provide children with access to relevant books and learning materials. Countries like Uganda and Kenya have made rapid progress in school building. They have improved the supply of books by opening up local markets for publishing and bookselling, and providing support to low-cost community building programmes.

Many teachers in developing countries are faced with classes of more than 100 pupils, not enough books and poor facilities. Lack of resources and teachers sometimes means children have to go to school in shifts. To teach the children currently out of school, and to reduce class sizes to the kind of number so that everyone gets a quality basic education, it is estimated that 15-20 million additional teachers will be needed around the world. In 1999 alone, one million children in Africa lost their teacher to AIDS.

Many poor households can't afford to send their children to school. The most obvious reason is because they have to pay fees. It is estimated that out of 94 poor countries, 77 have some type of school fee. One of the best results of debt cancellation over the last few years has been countries being able to scrap education charges - and millions of children have started to go to school for the first time as a result.

And there are many other costs that families have to bear, like paying for school uniforms, books and meals. Often parents depend on their children to work - either paid work, or just work around the home such as water collection. In Tanzania, there was a 12 per cent increase in school attendance when in one area water was made available fifteen minutes away from home, rather than an hour.

So we need a comprehensive approach: to build schools, abolish fees, improve infrastructure, address health issues, ensure there are enough teachers and encourage children to go to school. And to meet the education MDGs means being able to cover the costs not just over one or two years, but also over the full ten-year period to 2015. That is the scale of the challenge we face, and we need to rise to match that challenge.

And what we do in education we must also do in health. That's why, last week we launched in the UK the first bond issue of the International Finance Facility for Immunisation - a breakthrough in innovative financing which Goldman Sachs helped us with free of charge. Long-term, legally binding donor commitments are converted by capital markets into resources now. Over ten years, $4 billion to the Global Alliance for Vaccines & Immunisation, to tackle big killers in poor countries and we are using the capital markets, we can start using resources promised in future years

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The issue was over-subscribed. The first six $1000 bonds were purchased by the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the UK Chief Rabbi, the Muslim Council of Britain, the Hindu Forum of Britain and the Network of Sikh Organisations. Bono has since bought one too. Between now and 2015, it will mean we can immunise 500 million children and save ten million lives.

We need to scale up access to treatments, making them affordable to the poorest countries. That's why UNITAID was launched on a French initiative at the UN General Assembly in September, also using innovative long-term financing. It has raised £300 million so far.

Millions die each year from diseases where there are no effective vaccines - AIDS, Malaria, Tuberculosis, Pneumonia. We need a higher level of more sustained research and development. Only 10 % of the world's health R&D is spent on diseases accounting for 90 % of sickness in poor countries. These numbers are the wrong way round!

We need much higher levels of private investment. Advance Market Commitments are promising: donors underwriting purchasing power in poor countries, giving commercial incentives to speed up new vaccine development. The UK, with others, will soon launch an Advanced Market Commitment for a vaccine against pnemococcus, which kills 1.6 million people a year. A million malaria deaths a year will be the next target after that.

Education, healthcare. And also climate change. Tackling climate change - the world's biggest market failure - is not just an environmental and economic imperative, but a moral one: the threat is grievous injustice between generations as also between nations.

Every region will be affected. But the poorest - those most dependent on the natural world for survival, those with the least capacity to buy their way out of trouble - they will suffer most. I saw it first hand in the Chars livelihood programme in Bangladesh. The project is improving income and security for vulnerable women, men and children eking out a living on islands formed and continually shifting through erosion and deposition in a major river estuary. Their livelihoods and homes are under threat from climate change.

We need to adapt our development strategies for this new challenge. We can't allow poverty reduction, and our quest for the 2015 Goals, to be overwhelmed and reversed by climate change.

Every nation needs to work with others towards a low carbon economy, maintaining capacity for growth and development. Following Professor Nick Stern's review on the economics of climate change, published two weeks ago, the UK Government has called for a stable and sustainable world economy, based on low carbon.

We see five elements in an effective global response:

  1. The pricing of carbon, through tax, trading or regulation;
  2. Support for innovation and deployment of low-carbon technologies;
  3. Building innovative international partnerships;
  4. Helping developing countries adapt to climate change;
  5. Action to remove barriers to energy efficiency, and to inform and persuade individuals on personal responses to climate change.

Uniquely in the G7, Britain has met its Kyoto target. By 2010 we will have met it almost twice over, cutting greenhouse emissions by over 20%.

Professor Stern argues that international carbon trading, building on the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, will be particularly important for cost effective reductions. We want to extend it around the world:

  • First, by guaranteeing beyond 2012 the clean development mechanism with developing countries; and
  • Second, by linking with schemes in Japan, here in Australia, in the North Eastern US states, and now in California, where Tony Blair met Arnold Schwarzenegger in the summer.

Stern also highlights technology policy to reinforce carbon pricing and encourage low carbon technologies; and increased funding for low carbon technologies in the developing world.

We need new international partnerships. We must work with the rainforest countries, because deforestation increases global greenhouse emissions. We will work with Brazil, Papua New Guinea, Costa Rica and the Coalition of Rainforest Nations on mobilising international resources to help sustainable forest management.

A low carbon world economy will be built on a global carbon market. The Stern Review is stark. We need action now, there will be costs, but they will be manageable and the alternative is for greater costs and economic disclosure in the future on a large but affordable scale, to avert far greater future costs for humanity. And we all need to be working together. We want Stern to be discussed and debated as widely as possible around the world, by Governments and international institutions, by business leaders and, crucially by non-Government organisations, faith groups and civil society too. I hope you'll take the time to have a look at it.

So what role can Oaktree play in reaching the Millennium Development Goals? I see it in three ways.

First, your volunteering project work in itself plays a crucial part directly, by helping to empower communities in the developing world. Nobody must underestimate the importance of this.

Second, as young leaders here and overseas you promote the exchange of ideas, forge crucial links, raise expectations, develop knowledge, and expand horizons by building partnerships.

In the UK, we have found it very effective to twin our schools with schools in developing countries, for example in the Global Schools Partnership, which includes the British Council and Voluntary Service Overseas. The schools involved will have grants to fund visits between each other and to develop shared activities. There may be some ideas in this that Oaktree can help develop too.

Thirdly and lastly, you play a role through campaigning, by building public support. The important progress we have seen through Make Poverty History -and it has been very important- has been brought about by large numbers of ordinary people in this movement and others demanding change. You are the future. It is your world. You need to build the public alliances that will hold leaders like me to account.

A world without poverty is possible; it is up to Oaktree, to you in this room this afternoon, to persuade other people to join in achieving that vision. It can be done, and it must be. Let's work together to make sure that it is.

Thank you.

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