Every woman has the right to expect better odds than this. VSO is working in Sierra Leone to change things. VSO volunteers like Alice Waterman are training midwives in techniques that are saving lives. Like most UK charities working in international development, we receive money from  Government to fund a portion of our work. (Although we can always do more with more money so if you want to donate please click here) The more UK aid available, the more we can all contribute to changing the odds in favour of ordinary people. People who have ordinary needs and ordinary dreams, but who face extraordinary challenges in life. Over the next three years the gvernment plans to increase aid spending from 0.56% to 0.7% of Gross National Income. You can read my  comment about the budget from last week.

Today the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee (a group of twelve Lords and a Baroness) have released a report,   arguing that the UK government should focus on quality rather than on increasing the aid budget. Their press release, which has led to significant coverage in today’s media, was entitled ‘Government should abandon 0.7% target’.

The central policy proposal identified in the press release is that the target of increasing aid spending to a level of 0.7% should be dropped. They argue the government will “Wrongly prioritise the amount spent rather than results achieved.” and “Make the achievement of the target more important than the overall effectiveness of the programme.”

Their assertion seems to me completely baseless. Since coming to government, the coalition has reviewed all UK  aid programmes and set out a new vision for our aid (welcomed by the committee), it has set up a new Independent Commission for Aid Impact and in Andrew Mitchell’s response to the Economic Affairs Committee report, he makes it clear that aid spending is about results: “11 million children into school, vaccinate 55 million children against preventable diseases and stop 250,000 newborn babies dying needlessly.” The Secretary of State and Government have made results the primary focus at DFID. It is ridiculous for the Lords Committee to assert that focus will divert onto getting the money out of the door for the sake of it.

We can all get started right away. Right now on the Daily Mail’s website dozens of people are commenting on the Economic Affairs Committee Aid Report.. Comments include “This is our taxes that you [UK Government] are squandering on your self serving world stage image not yours!! If YOU and your CRONIES want to [g]ive money to these overseas countries use YOUR OWN MONEY and use OUR taxes for the benefit of OUR people!!!” If they are left unchallenged then the Daily Mail will continue to set an editorial policy which is anti-development. We need to make sure that readers of the Daily Mail know that a lot of aid money is well spent and makes an enormous difference to people’s lives.

So get onto their website and get commenting. Write down your own stories of change, tell them about and link to the VSO stories and make your own case for our aid spending.

World Aids Day

Yesterday was World Aids Day. The 1st of December is a single day selected by the UN and civil society around the world when we focus every year on the HIV/AIDS pandemic that has claimed over 30 million lives since the disease was identified in June 1981. It has to be said that World Aids Day is one of the few ‘issue based days’ that has really made it into the limelight with world leaders making announcements and pledges and statements almost every year (others might be International Women’s Day and Human Rights Day). This year marks thirty years of progress in our efforts to overcome the pandemic and so celebrations of our progress and pledges to hasten work have been even more pronounced than usual.

I suppose the fact that it’s thirty years since we discovered the disease is kind of by-the-by; in that 30 years is just an arbitrary milestone. Why isn’t 29 years a ‘special’ milestone, or 31 years? Surely HIV/ AIDs needs just as much attention every year? But anyway we can put that to one side for the moment because this year was a big deal for two other reasons.

1) As this moving video tells us progress on treating people who have contracted HIV has progressed in leaps and bounds, especially due to the advocacy and activism of people around the world. However a medical trial published this year has shown that treating people with up to date Anti-Retroviral drugs can reduce transmission of the virus by 96%. This discovery proves that if governments around the world persist we really can end AIDS in a generation. You can email the Prime Minister to ask him to continue making ending AIDS a government priority and watch the video here.

2) As Paul Boateng and Aaron Oxley highlight in the Guardian a great deal of this progress and opportunity could be pushed aside by rich country donors reneging on their promise to fund work on HIV and AIDS. The Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria which distributes money to HIV and AIDS programmes on behalf of numerous rich country governments has, for the first time in it’s 10 year history, had to cancel it’s next round of funding and suspend grants to life saving projects. All this due to the rich country donors failing to meet their promises on overseas aid. Read more in this incisive article.

Of course VSO has worked on HIV/AIDS for a long time and you can see what we do on our website and yesterday we hosted a Christmas Concert to raise funds for our HIV/AIDS work.

Climate Change

Climate Change is having a massive impact on people in poor countries around the world. It exacerbates and creates disasters such as floods and droughts but it also changes weather patterns, seasons and that creates havoc for people (especially women) who work the land growing food for themselves and for export to all of us. Planning when to sew your seeds, when to cut your crop and how to manage your land is pretty tough when you don’t know if or when its going to rain and shine. (You can read VSO’s position paper on Climate Change here.)

Every year at the end of November and beginning of December the worlds governments get together to try to talk about how we are going to face up to this tumultuous problem and whether or not we (as humanity) are going to take it seriously. The last few summits have been something like a damp squib; very basically every year the concerned population of the world build up hope for a global solution to the mess and every year (so far) world leaders have failed to come up with the goods. (In this case ‘the goods’ would be a new global treaty on climate change which limits emissions in order to maintain temperatures below 2 degrees and that produces hundreds of billions of dollars from the rich world to the poor in order to assist with the adaptation that they will have to undergo as a result of the climate change that rich countries have mostly caused.) One website, at least in my eyes, is by far the leading light in revealing what on earth is going on at the negotiations. That website is One Climate which cleverly enables you to watch proceedings live and delivers top notch interviews with activists, governments and commentators. Well done to the folks over at One Climate for a very much loved link.

UK Aid

Finally, I couldn’t write a Links we Love this week without referring to the huge news in the UK that because of lower UK Economic growth the UK Development budget is being cut by approximately £1.2billion over the next 3 years. Obviously there’s not a lot to love in this situation as £1.2billion is really a huge amount not to be spending on Aid. However, despite this, we’ve got to keep positive; the government is fulfilling it’s pledge to spend 0.7% on aid by 2013 and in doing so will finally meet a 41year old promise. We’ve also got to make doubly sure that the government enshrine this minimum level of spending in law and that UK Aid is focused as much as possible on making a real difference for real people in poor communities by working with them so they can get themselves out of poverty. you can read more about why this is happening and what we all need to do in my blog from earlier this week.

As usual if you’ve got any Links you Love please do share them in the comments below!