Advocating world leaders to pick up the arms to fight poverty using measures of dramatic aid increase, debt relief and anti-corruption strategies in the African Commission report released this month, British prime minister Tony Blair is convinced that wealthy nations need to wake up, smell the stark reality of poverty in Africa and pay their share.
"There can be no excuse, no defence, no justification for the plight of millions of our fellow beings in
The 400-page report, Our Common Interest, calls on the international community to immediately double foreign aid to Africa, to $50bn (£26bn), and make fighting Aids a priority. It sets 100% debt cancellation as a goal and urges rich nations to drop trade barriers that hurt poor countries. The report calls for a partnership with African leaders, who it says must move faster toward democracy, tackle corruption and end the conflicts that block aid from producing results.
Mr. Blair has made helping
"In a world where prosperity is increasing and more people are sharing each year in this growing wealth, it is an obscenity that should haunt our daily thoughts that 4 million children in Africa will die this year before their fifth birthday," Mr Blair said, calling for a new partnership between the developed world and Africa "that goes beyond the old donor and recipient relationship".
"If we fail to act we will betray the future not only of hundreds, millions of children in
Africans and others working to solve the continent's problems said the challenge was to implement the report's recommendations.
"Unless we deliver, it'll just be another report," said Myles Wickstead, the director of the Commission for
The chancellor, Gordon Brown, spelled out the results of previous failed initiatives. The promise of the millennium development goals to halve poverty in
"Africans have long known the virtues of patience, but the world should know that 150 years is too long to wait for justice," he said.
Commissioner Anna Tibaijuka, of
That spectre of failed promises obviously haunted Mr Blair, who said he feared the judgment of future generations, who would ask: "How could wealthy people so aware of such suffering just turn away and busy themselves with other things?"