Aid at home vs. aid abroad

“If you had a pound would you give a halfpenny to stop someone dying in the street? The answer is you probably would”. Alan Duncan, Britain’s international development minister, defends David Cameron’s decision to donate 2.5 billion euros to global aid despite the economic crisis that has seen Britain slash its national budgets. “We are stopping millions of people dying from disease, we are helping to educate people and make them healthy” added Duncan.

On June 13 Cameron will host the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI) Conference in London. Many consider this conference a vital step towards reducing child mortality in Africa and the funding pledged by the UK will enable Gavi to distribute two vaccines, pneumococcal and rotavirus and tackle the two biggest killers of children in the developing world: pneumonia and diarrhoea. It is thought the vaccines will save more than 4 million lives by 2015. According to statistics from The Guardian, Pneumonia accounts for 20% of all deaths of children under five.

Germany announced last week that it would give €30m to GAVI in 2012 and the Obama administration is being asked for 315 million euros to help fund the programme over three years. Cameron spoke passionately about global development at the close of the G8 summit of industrialised nations in France last week. The UK Department for International Development is the only UK department not facing budget cuts.