Tom Leary's Blog

The Millennium Villages Project has been working with governments and communities to provide better public health services, clean water and sanitation, more reliable food production, better roads and schools and other services to more than 500,000 people across 10 African countries. A group of researchers who studied the impact of the program in Millennium Villages Project sites found the mortality rate among children under age 5 dropped by 22 percent in just three years, according to the study, published May 8 in the British journal Lancet.

Now the CHWs are seen to be a key part of a functioning primary health system. This system should include a clinic within short walking distance, with supplies, a skilled birth attendant and other staff, electricity, and safe water; an ambulance for emergency transport; an emergency “911” number; a policy of free care at the point of service (so as not to turn away the indigent); and trained and remunerated CHWs, taught also to treat diseases and save lives in the community.

Ghana has made economic leaps in the past year due to the commencement of oil production and increasing levels of foreign direct investment. Ghana was one of world’s fastest growing economies in 2011 with an annual growth rate of 14 percent and it achieved middle-income status according the World Bank. Inflation has been on the decline in the past year and the Ghana Investment and Promotion Council said that Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) totaled $4.13 billion in the first three quarters of the 2011, a massive increase from the level of investment in the same quarter in 2010 that was at $216.71 million.

It’s really not a time to be a rich rock star talking about poor people, I’ll tell you that, or a film star, or a first lady or a … – there’s just something… it’s like “Why don’t you just piss off back to your chateau” – and so I’m kind of delighted that people keep doing it. Outside the UK, we won’t get much coverage for these issues without famous faces – and without coverage, politicians are less supportive.

Jamie Drummond, the executive director of ONE, says: “ONE helped get the first financing for the Global Fund 10 years ago and it’s had a wonderful multimillion-life-saving first decade – but needs a big boost for the next 10 years to not just halt but turn back the tide of Aids, TB and malaria.

A survey just found the Global Fund the second most transparent aid mechanism in the world. That’s why One is pushing for the UK to double its funding this year.”

From his first days in office, Ban emphasized that many or most of the world’s greatest challenges come down to a simple yet stark reality: we are now a crowded, interconnected, global society, with seven billion people struggling to find a foothold on a highly vulnerable planet. The challenges of feeding the world, keeping it safe from epidemic diseases such as malaria and AIDS, and combining economic progress with local and global environmental safety are the defining challenges of our time. War and violence often have as underlying causes hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation, such as human-induced climate change.

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Every time that financial and human resources are directed to these challenges - whether fighting smallpox (now eradicated) or polio (almost eradicated), or malaria or AIDS - lo and behold, we achieve great progress: death rates down, new infections down, quality of life improved.

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There has been much discussion of the qualifications and nationality of the next head of the International Monetary Fund. This talk is insufficiently ambitious. The fund’s next head must be a genuine economic architect capable of helping to design an entirely new international monetary framework.

The defining truth of our time is that the US-led international order – the one that gave birth to the IMF – is over. The problems in Greece, Ireland and Portugal are serious, but Europe can largely manage them itself. The IMF’s new leader must be chosen to address longer-term and more complex global challenges.