Hi, my name is Peter Edington.  I am a round the world yachtsman, I have a 60-foot boat I built by hand in England.  It has the words MAKE POVERTY HISTORY all down the side in letters 2 feet high. I use it to raise money, awareness or both for a number of charities from Africa to Canada, from the UK to Australia

If all you do with a boat is race it on a Wednesday evening, then it is merely a possession.  But, if you use it to go to places you wouldn’t have otherwise gone to and to see things you wouldn’t otherwise have seen, then it becomes a window onto another world. And it was sailing it to Africa with SightSavers International that opened my eyes to the true meaning of the acronym HIPC – a “Heavily Indebted Poor Country”.

In 1998, we – that is my wife, myself and two of our three teenage daughters – had the great good fortune to be asked by Sightsavers International (the UK equivalent of The Fred Hollows Foundation) to take cataract replacement, intra-ocular lens kits 200 miles up the Gambia River. Here, locally trained surgeons (more accurately 2 surgeons and 3 or 4 trained-up male nurses) took over a dilapidated building in the river village of Kaur, hosed down it’s dusty rooms to make them “sterile” and worked from dawn to dusk for 4 days giving sight back to nearly 300 West Africans.

It is a little known fact that:

•  if you go blind in rural Africa it will probably be from cataracts

•  that this condition is entirely reversible for the price of a round of drinks ($25)

•  that without the blindness being treated, the probability is that you will die within 4 years

It is not uncommon to see children (children who should be in school) walking along in front of their prematurely blinded mother or father leading them with a stick.  This is a double tragedy:

• the parent is unable to grow food or feed their family

•  and the child is unable to get that basic education they need to lift themselves from poverty

AND Education and Health go hand in hand

• in Africa a girl who receives 2 years basic schooling is 5 times less likely to get AIDS

THAT is the crux of the problem - the connection between poverty, education and health.

It’s a spiral:

In the Developed World it is an UPWARD spiral. 

• Wealth leads to better education and health

• better education and health lead to employment and wealth.

In the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries, it is a DOWNWARD spiral.

• Poverty means poor education, poor health

• poor health leads to more poverty and life expectancy falls.  Average life expectancy in Africa is under 40 years of age!

I don’t think people really understand the fundamental part that Africa has played in creating the wealth of the Developed World, today. 

You need to go back in history - not as far back as 3 million years when the ancestors of every human being on earth first walked out of Africa.

Let us start with the 17th Century and the forced removal of whole generations of Africans from Africa.  Adults and children, slaves who powered the economic growth of every major country of the world:   France;   Portugal;   Spain;   Britain;  America.

The developed world grew rich on the backs of Africans forced into slavery.

• Not thousands of Africans

• Not hundreds of thousands of Africans

• But 3.6 million Africans forced into slavery

 What about the English speaking countries… Britain and America?

… without the slave trade, Britain and America would never have gained huge wealth from the sugar, cotton and tobacco grown in the Americas - free of all labour charges for over two hundred years.

And what about Globalisation, since then?

… without exploiting the flood of freed African-American slaves who travelled up the Mississippi to the industrial heartlands of Chicago and Detroit, today’s mega-corporations of General Motors and Ford could not have revolutionised the world with cheap, affordable motor cars and trucks.

And then there’s all that gold and diamonds, copper and oil...

…where did the wealth go that was created in Africa by the indigenous Africans - those people who worked for pennies under intolerable conditions in gold mines and in diamond mines while denied the right to walk freely on their own land under apartheid’s infamous “Pass” laws.  Where did the wealth go that was created by these people?  It was shipped, wholesale out of Africa, by their Colonial Masters.

First we carried off the Africa’s people, then we carried off Africa’s natural wealth.

But then came the 1960s – an era of new-found independence for the 50 or more nations of Africa.  A spirit of hope and optimism flooded through the continent. Nothing would be impossible for these fledgling nations.

And this spirit of optimism was fuelled in October 1970 when Canadian Prime Minister, Lester Pearson, led the Developed World to pass UN resolution 2626 promising to give 0.7% of their Gross National Income in “Overseas Development Aid” to the developing nations of the world, 44 of which lie in sub-Saharan Africa.

And they didn’t do this entirely out of altruism, any more than the American Marshall Plan had been entirely altruistic.  Even back in 1970, the Developed World realised the potential danger that “Failed States” would bring to democracy and the world of Mom’s Apple-Pie.  (They weren’t so far wrong, either if today’s concerns about terrorism are anything to go by.)

But that was almost forty years ago, now.  Forty years during which those same nations, including America, Japan, Great Britain and Australia have repeated their pledge of 0.7%.

They did it as recently as 2000 when they all signed up to the Millennium Development Goals

• to halve world poverty by 2015;

• to achieve universal primary education;

• to cut child mortality by two-thirds;

• to reduce by three-quarters, the proportion of women who die in childbirth;

• to halt and reverse the spread of AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.

All this by 2015.  Grand ideals indeed.  So how far have we got with them?

Which countries have actually honoured their promise of 0.7%?

• Australia? No;

• America? No;

• Britain? No;

• Japan? No.

Let me tell you who has…

–        Holland; Norway; Denmark; Belgium and Sweden.

And yet it is the strongest economies of the world whose contribution would make the biggest difference.

•  America gives a tiny 0.22% out of the 0.7%

• Japan 0.28%

• Europe around 0.33%

• It is shameful that Australia still give less than 0.3% - less than half what we have promised.  And they only achieved that by economic sleight of hand (as others did, it should be said), writing off debts to Iraq last year, at the request of George Bush, which does nothing at all to increase our Overseas Development Aid

To put this in perspective:

-          In 2005, the so-called civilised world (mostly the United States of America) spent a trillion dollars – that is one thousand billion dollars – on weaponry.

-          In the same year, 2005, ten million children died as a direct result of poverty

• from starvation;

• from drinking polluted water

• from poor or totally lacking sanitation

• and from AIDS and other diseases.

Without the 0.7% in Overseas Development Aid, the Millennium Development Goals will simply not be met. I’m sorry to labour this point but it's important

–        to me,

–        to Jeffrey Sachs in his book The End of Poverty,

–        To Tony Blair's 2005 Commission for Africa,

–        but most of all to the people of Africa.

Finally, let us look at debt:

During the 1980s, the countries of the Developed World were awash with cash to invest and a number of geopolitical reasons to invest it.  So they looked around and their eyes lighted on Africa. 

But in their haste , they did what some banks and mortgage companies have been doing recently.  They gave the money away without proper regard for the borrower’s ability to repay.

Now unlike a house which you can snatch back and sell, or a company which can be put into liquidation… when a nation can’t make it’s monthly payments, you can’t repossess it or declare it bankrupt.  No, when a nation can’t pay you send in the accountants - and they restructure the nation, to recover as much of the money as they can.  If you do the arithmetic you will see that many African countries have been paying as much as 18% interest.  Eighteen percent!  Is it any wonder the capital sum is never paid off.  There simple isn’t enough money in the debtor nation to do that.

I would like to quote from Stephen Lewis’s book “Race against Time”.  Stephen Lewis was for almost a decade, Kofi Annan’s Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa.

“It may seem hard to believe but between 1970 and 2002, Africa acquired $294 billion dollars in debt.  Much of the debt was assumed by military dictators who profited beyond the dreams of avarice, and left for the people of their countries, the crushing burden of payment.

“Over the same period, it paid back $260 billion mostly in interest. At the end of it all Africa continued to owe upwards of $230 billion in debt.  Surely that is the definition of international economic obscenity.  Here you have the poorest continent in the world paying off its debt again and again, and forever being grotesquely in hoc.”

And how did Africa achieve this colossal out-pouring of its life-blood in debt servicing?

The World Bank and IMF introduced Structural Adjustment Plans or SAPs.  That is to say, they forced the governments of every Heavily Indebted Poor African Country to prioritise debt-repayment over everything else.  Over that period repayment took precedence over everything.  African countries spent more money on debt-repayment than they did on Health or on Education, or – in many cases – on Health and Education combined 

... and as we have seen, Poverty, Education and Health are inextricably connected in a deadly spiral.

So! At the very time when AIDS was first appearing in Africa, at a time when fighting the disease through education and health were paramount – these very services were being cut to the bone by us, by you and me, through the offices of the World Bank and the IMF.

And we wonder why Africa is in the state it is today.  Already struggling with malaria which is practically endemic, Africa was then hit by the worst epidemic ever to face the human race - AIDS.

According to the UNAIDS fact sheet for 2005,

• 24 million people are living with HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa

•  64% of all people living with HIV/AIDS are in sub-Saharan Africa

•  75% of all women living with HIV/AIDS are in sub-Saharan Africa

•  2 million children (90% of all children in the world living with the disease) are in sub-Saharan Africa.

•  12 million are orphaned by AIDS, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa

Every day 30,000 children die needlessly as a result of poverty.  Not all of them are in Africa and not all of them from AIDS, you should include Malaria, TB, dysentery and malnutrition.

I can think of nothing that would be more tragic - more utterly devastating - to me than the loss of one of my own daughters.  It would be heart-breaking almost beyond endurance....

And, here’s a thought, it is no less tragic, no less devastating to a young mother in a village in Africa.

I am sorry to have painted such a bleak picture.

But it does not need to be bleak.  I think anyone who has spent time in Africa would agree with me when I say that I have never met more friendly, more generous and more optimistic people than I found in Africa.  I will never forget that, as we lay at anchor in the Gambia River, 100 metres off from the village of Kaur - where in the days before the surgeons had restored sight to almost 300 Africans - we would wake to the sound of the women of the village pounding millet and singing in the pre-dawn light.  The wonderful rhythmic thump-thump-thump as they raised and dropped the wooden poles they used to pound the cereal, together with their song, is so evocative of my time there - of a country where people who had so little asked for so little from us.

What did the children of Kaur ask for whenever they flocked to our sides?  Was it televisions or x-boxes?  Was it bicycles or skate boards?  No of course not.  They would hold out their hands and ask if we had brought any biscuits and pencils.

As I say it doesn’t need to be so bleak, our governments could change it tomorrow.

For almost forty years they have dishonoured their promise to Africa

• a continent whose sweated labour, whose oil and gas, whose gold and diamonds have been plundered

• a continent whose last Kenyan Shilling, Congolese Franc and Sudanese Pound have been taken in interest payments to make us rich beyond our needs

• a continent who, like her children on the river bank at Kaur, asks for so little

-          Free primary education for all

-          Enough food to make their children strong

-          A health system, free from Structural Adjustment Plans and Conditionality, 

• that can afford to employ enough doctors, nurses and mid-wives (Uganda has 1 doctor for every 24,000 patients.)

• that can stop 1 in every 13 women dying in childbirth

• that can provide nevirapine for every HIV positive mother (nevirapine is single-dose anti-retroviral drug that halves mother to child transmission of HIV.)

• that can provide a hospital with enough beds so that patients dying of AIDS – patients who in any Developed Country in the world would be in Intensive Care Units – don’t need to share beds top-to toe like kids at a sleep-over.

As I say, it doesn’t have to be that bleak.

Prime Ministers John Howard, Tony Blair, Shinzo Abe of Japan and President George Bush could provide that now!

But they do nothing... 

...and each year another ten million children die needlessly.

So it falls to people like you and me to shame them into honouring their promises to save millions of African lives.

Thank you.

Peter Edington