In defence of foreign aid | Joe Cerrell | TEDxASL

great well good afternoon I want to start by asking you a question and that's how many of you have heard of the disease guinea worm please raise your hands not too many it's not surprising because well though guinea worm is an ancient disease chronicled by Greek writers as far back as the 2nd century BC it's a disease that's long ago been eradicated in rich countries you get the disease by ingesting water that's infected with the worms of Guinea with the with the eggs of guinea worms and once inside you these eggs can grow to be up to 3 feet long after about a year the worm has an makes an agonizing lesion in your skin as it slowly emerges from the body and this is a process that can take more than a month so imagine that there's a worm that's three feet long creating an incredibly painful lesion in your legs emerging from the body you can't walk so you can't work you can't go to school and the pain is so agonizing you can't concentrate so you can't read a book you can't carry on a conversation you have to sit there line for a month waiting for this worm to fully emerge about five years ago I was part of a delegation that traveled with the Gates Foundation's Global Health team to West Africa we were traveling in the region looking at some of the programs that we were funding and one in northern Ghana was a program that we were funding with the Carter Center and the Carter Center is an institute that was started by the former president to address global health they were working in the region to try to eliminate guinea worm so part of our visit included a trip to this clinic where representatives from the center would take care of kids during this torturous extraction process they would look after them and try to provide what comfort they could during the month or so where they had to be there and help uncoil this worm every day a few more millimeters at a time and while I was there I met a child who was about six years old roughly the same age as my son at the time and this boy was incredibly brave because although he was in near agony he talked excitedly about the day that he could finally rejoin his family returned to school to resume his education and this experience really jarred me it jarred me because although I had seen firsthand what happens when you don't have access to decent health care you've seen what happens to communities in those cases it was one of the first times that I traveled to the developing world as a father and so I tried to imagine what it would be like if it were my son that were being treated for guinea worm in that clinic what it would be like as a father to watch helplessly as one of your children were in agony for a month all because of lack of access to clean water but the story has a happy ending and an end and you might not expect because the folks at the Carter Center realized a pattern of infection they saw how when people infected with guinea worms to ease the burning sensation of this emerging worm would plunge their limbs into water and that that would trigger the guinea worm to release more larvae into the water which other children might drink and repeat the cycle all over again so they created these ingenious pumps very inexpensive as well that resembles something like a Stairmaster that would when used filter the water and prevent infection from guinea worm and other kinds of parasites and you can see what happens when when children have clean water than they do weren't getting infected and we were seeing already what was happening that community as a result of the Carter centers investments there and it's worked since 1986 when the Carter Center first started working on guinea worm elimination they've been able to reduce the numbers of infection from about 3.5 million children roughly in 21 countries around the world they've reduced it by 99% and this year alone they the number of new infections has been about a hundred and fifty so we stand on the brink of one day very soon being able to eradicate this disease entirely from the face of the earth which would only be the second time in human history behind smallpox that we were able to do this now I tell the story for two reasons the first is that it's a moral outrage that millions of people continue to suffer needlessly from infections and diseases that have long ago been wiped out in places like the United States and the UK but the second reason is that most people haven't heard of these success stories they don't know we're worse if asked they would say things are not actually getting better so because of this the Gates Foundation has invested heavily in efforts to try to increase the amount of visibility that's paid to what's going on in global health and to really shine a spotlight on what has made a lot of these successes possible and there have been a number of reasons for the successes that we've seen countries are increasing improving their economic development there's better infrastructure there's more affordable access to new drugs but there's been another indisputable factor and that's the generosity of donors like the UK the u.s. others and by extension the citizen taxpayers in those countries so for this reason as head of the Gates Foundation's European office I spend a lot of time working in government ministries trying to make the case to policymakers that the small amounts of money that go in their budget to International Development Assistance which is commonly referred to as aid is having a remarkable impact in the lives of millions of the poorest people around the world and that even in these tough times even when circumstances are so dire they can still afford to maintain these commitments to fighting global poverty and what these policymakers will tell you is they agree but their constituents don't believe it so they can't vote for it they say the gare constituents think that Aid is ineffective or the charity starts at home and that's especially true when times are tough so politicians don't think that Aid is a priority and Aid is put on a chopping block we risk D raylene much of the progress that we've seen in recent years so the question is why do people think Aid is ineffective and why is it too expensive well part of the reasons may be obvious because many of the images that people see and read about in places like Africa are pretty bleak still it paints a portrait of a continent where nothing good can happen they don't talk a lot about the successes that we're seeing they don't talk about the fact that a majority of the top ten fastest-growing economies in the world are based in the continent of Africa but the other reason perhaps is less obvious and is based more on just plain misinformation I want to show you a video now that was done by an organization called one which asked people on the street in the UK how much they think their government spends on Development Assistance and what's been achieved with that so what do you think about spending on overseas aid laughter we do too much of it feels good I think the UK spends a lot of money overseas and maybe they should spending on overseas aid I think it's positive I think you gotta help everyone I don't think we should think just about a country I think it's about helping the world generally we have enough problems here that this adversary's business what percentage of Britain's gross national income do you think is spent on overseas aid well I would say about 15% 10% probably around 10% about 20% maybe I say about 20% 60 70 percent have a lot of clothes what would you say if I tell you it's less than 0.7 percent do you always tell lies nothing so much I would have thought but if you say that I do believe that's that's wrong and how many children's lives in poor countries do you think vaccines have saved in the last ten years a lot probably looking into the thousands twenty thousand maybe fifteen thousand three hundred thousand the number of kids saved by vaccination in the last 10 years is 5.4 million wow that's really good that's impressive five four that's excellent that's brilliant he's really good how many more children in poor countries do you think have been able to enroll in school over the last ten years I would probably put that about 50,000 tens of thousands probably 20,000 the number of kids enrolled in school was 46 million in Africa alone that's good news that's good news shock horror surprise incredible how many okay 46 million in Africa alone a class where they should do more to show that though because we didn't we don't really see that so what's your message to the government now okay Anna your pocket my message to the government is giving aid I think no point seven percent is we can probably all afford a little bit more increase the spending if that's what we can achieve I'm not kind of separate descendants just think what we could achieve if we did increase it by giving more you can help more and more people I need them with the people who can do the message is clear that if more people knew what is undeniably true and that's that ade represents a tiny portion of government's budgets and that much of it is working then they'd be more inclined to support it now I mentioned that another thing that people often cite about Aid is that it's ineffective and and to me that commonly translates into this notion that a delivered from rich countries to poor countries often ends up in the pockets of corrupt dictators who use this money to buy mansions and new cars and it's true that there have been a lot of cases of aid misused over the years but it's also true that a lot of the aid dispersed before say around the year 2000 was oftentimes not exposed exclusively on poverty alleviation in fact it was used to try to forge political alliances and to try to buy access to a country's natural resources today we know a lot better about what works and what doesn't innate and let me give you just one example there's an organization called Gavi it was set up in part with the Gates Foundation support about a decade ago and the purpose of Gavi is to make sure that all kids everywhere have access to life-saving vaccines the way it works is that countries can apply to receive money to buy and distribute vaccines and gabi is efficient it's efficient because countries have to prove in their applications that they have the systems in place to deliver these vaccines it's efficient because corrupt dictators don't typically stockpile vaccines it's really efficient because Gavi buys at such a high volume that they're going to food they can really bring the prices of these vaccines way down so we should all be really proud to be supporting organizations like this and the results have been impressed that you heard in the video in the last 10 years more than 5 and well 5.4 mmm children lives have been saved as a result of the work that Gabi is doing there's another statistic though I want to show you it's the one that we obsess about more than any other in the Gates Foundation and it's the number of kids who die before their fifth birthday and as this graph shows we've made incredible progress on this in the in a relatively short period of time in 1990 sorry 1960 about 20 million children lost their lives before the age of five and today that numbers been brought down to about 6 million now you might say to yourself if we're saving all these lives aren't we just increasing put in added stress on the overpopulation and while that might seem the case the truth is when you reduce child mortality when families know their children will survive they choose to have fewer babies we've seen this to be the case in the UK and other European nations where our great-great-grandparents typically had much larger family size than is the average today but let's use the same graph to show what would happen if we interrupted the pace of progress that we're making using some really advanced modeling that that has been done by Johns Hopkins University we can actually show what would happen if we stopped providing life-saving things that we know will help children under 5 you can see that this pace of progress would be interrupted and it will in fact start to reverse over the next few years but then using the same methodology these researchers looked at what would happen if we increased our access to children under five with five basic simple inexpensive interventions and I'll show those to you the first is childhood vaccination if we increased childhood vaccination reaching more kids in the poorest 66 countries of the world we could save 500,000 lives every year but then we'll add other intervention Jen you'll see that the the progress and the potential is astonishing if we treat more kids with malaria the line goes down even further childhood nutrition neonatal care which includes newborn care as well as safe delivery for mothers and then finally prevention treatment of riah and pneumonia two of the leading killers of kits in the developing world and the picture you have here is pretty dramatic because what it says is that by 2025 if we provide access to these five simple things we can prevent the deaths of 2.7 million children every single year and more astonishing is the total number in that period nearly 19 million children's lives saved by 2025 so this is too big an opportunity for us to pass out now I don't want to leave you with the impression that aid alone is the answer countries altima Lee have to be able to sustain funding for issues like agriculture like health and ultimately wean themselves off of Aid and we know though that aid can play a helpful role in putting countries on the path to independence by breaking the vicious cycle of poverty and disease and we've seen what happens in South Asia where countries have gone in some cases from being an aid recipient to a Tate donor in less than 50 years and the role that aid had in helping countries along the way so what I think stands is the biggest obstacle to achieve in many of these goals as public apathy or put another way if more people could see the impact that aid when invested well is having and how it's contributing to a record decline in things like childhood death they'd be much more excited about the progress and the potential in the future and at the same people demanded of their governments that they at least maintain these commitments if not improve or increase the contributions in the future then politicians would feel much more accountable to their citizens now I want to leave you with a couple numbers two numbers actually they're actually saved the dates the first is September 15th 2015 and that's the date when leaders will come together in New York at the United Nations and take stock on the progress of the so-called Millennium Development Goals eight targets that were set in the year 2000 agreed to by the leaders of 189 nations and while we still have two years to go on the Millennium Development Goals the MDGs based on the progress we're seeing it will be a moment for the world to celebrate but it will also be the same day as leaders start to agree to a new set of goals that will guide the next 15 years in the war on global poverty now my inclination is that leaders won't be naturally signing up to bold and historic commitments they won't want to make big new financial pledges but if these same leaders felt a sense of urgency amongst their constituents that this truly was a historic moment one that was too big to pass up then they might just sign on to the ambitious but very achievable target of eradicating extreme poverty by the year 2030 and that's that's the next save the data I would give you because 2030 should be especially important to the parents of kindergarten students here 2030 if all goes according to plan is the year that your students your children will graduate from college and what a great graduation gift it would be to say that's the year that the world ended extreme poverty based on the collective actions and decisions we took in 2015 thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 21,444

Rating: 4.6834531 out of 5

Keywords: TEDx, ted x, tedx talk, ted talks, tedx talks, tedx, ted talk, ted

Id: CL-0mCN6-BI

Length: 17min 47sec (1067 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 25 2013