[Ip-health] UK PM Brown calls on Google to help world's poor

[Michelle Childs]

--
[ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2007/dec/10/
internationalaidanddevelopment.google
Brown calls on Google to help world's poor

Talks held with multinationals to tackle 'development emergency'

     * Larry Elliott Sarah Boseley
     * The Guardian,
     * Monday December 10 2007

Gordon Brown plans to harness at least 20 of the world's biggest
multinational companies, including Google and Vodafone, to tackle a
"development emergency" in the world's poorest countries and put the
international community back on course to achieve seven UN
development goals by 2015.

As a UN report released today shows limited progress in hitting goals
intended to tackle poverty, education, health and sanitation, the
prime minister has been holding talks with the internet and telecoms
giants as well as other international companies including Goldman
Sachs and Wal-Mart in an attempt to find ways of increasing growth in
poor countries.

Brown will use three set-piece events next year - a conference
involving the private sector in London in the spring, next summer's
meeting of the G8 in Japan and a UN session in New York in the autumn
- to reinvigorate the drive to hit the UN's millennium development
goals, set in 2000.

Brown told the Guardian: "We are half way to the target date of 2015,
but a long way off track to our goals and face a development
emergency. 2008 should be a development year and mark a call to
action from everyone - not just rich and poor governments but civil
society, faith groups, trade unions and even the private sector.

"There are 72 million children not going to primary school, in some
countries one woman in six dies in childbirth, over a billion people
do not have access to safe drinking water. The international
community needs to face up to this development emergency. We know
what to do - we need to keep our promises and act. I am therefore
calling for an millennium development goals action meeting during the
UN general assembly in September to re-examine and galvanise our
efforts."

Preparations for Brown's initiative have been under way since the
summer, but the emphasis on development - a key feature of Brown's 10
years at the Treasury - is intended to show that the government can
recover from its battering this autumn.

Ministers have been holding intensive discussions with the private
sector in the hope that firms can be persuaded to use their expertise
to improve infrastructure, upgrade skills and provide capital for
fresh investment. Although the prominence given to multinationals is
likely to be controversial with parts of the development community,
Brown believes a lack of enterprise is hindering least-developed
countries - especially in sub-Saharan Africa - achieving the
development goals.

While Brown intends to keep pressing Britain's G8 partners to meet
the aid pledges made at the Gleneagles summit in 2005, the emphasis
on the role of the private sector marks the start of a new phase in
the government's development strategy. The development minister, Lady
Vadera, who said recently that growth was the "single biggest factor
separating success from failure" in developing countries, has been
speaking to multinational corporations and Brown believes there is
the prospect of initiatives in financial services, mobile telephony
and agriculture over the coming year.

Kevin Watkins, editor of the UN's annual human development report,
said achieving growth without attempting to tackle inequality would
not put the global community back on course to achieve the millennium
development goals. Child death rates were two to three times higher
for the poorest 20% of people and were falling more slowly than the
average.

"We are all in favour of high growth," he said, "but there has been a
failure in some high growth countries, such as India, to deliver on
human progress because of inequality. The key to achieving the
development goals is to concentrate on helping the very poor."

Peter Salama, Unicef's chief of health, said a priority was to get
proper health systems running in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia.

---------
Michelle Childs
Head of European Affairs
Knowledge Ecology International
michelle.childs@keionline.org