The cynics are wrong — our aid saves lives
MY Son worked for the Department for international Development for some time and many of the areas he had to visit in his job were quite dangerous. i received the department’s in-house magazine and was touched at the good work it does. in the past 12 months, thanks to people like my son, the number of children under five dying from preventable diseases every year has fallen by 700,000 — the biggest drop in child deaths ever recorded. People such as my son would go into some pretty nasty areas, stop their cars and leap out and plant their flags of identity, hoping they wouldn’t be shot at before they had a chance to vaccinate the children. in the past ten years, smallpox has been virtually wiped out, HiV has been halted from infecting about six million people, and about 50 million more children are in primary school, which gives all of them a chance to improve their lives. Should anyone begrudge their money going for this sort of work? Sometimes it does get into the wrong hands but mostly it doesn’t — it goes to the people who need it most. Why is there so much less famine in ethiopia? Because feeding stations have been set up in walking distance of such areas so people in need don’t suffer starvation. is that wrong? We aren’t a poor country. our measure of poverty is ridiculous compared with people in Africa and india. My son saw a lady in Darfur whose ‘home’ was three sticks in the ground supporting a polythene bag. Would anyone really claim our money is ‘wasted’ on people like her?