Classrooms with teachers, clinics with nurses, running taps and working toilets — these basic public services are key to ending global poverty, according to a report by Oxfam and WaterAid. And they say only governments are in a position to deliver on the scale needed to transform the lives of millions living in poverty.
The report, In the Public Interest, calls on developing country governments to devote a greater proportion of their budgets to building these vital services for their citizens. And for rich countries to support their plans with increased, long-term aid commitment.
Rich countries and the World Bank come under fire for undermining governments’ ability to deliver public services by pushing inappropriate private sector projects in water provision and health. The report acknowledges that, while the private sector has a role to play, along with charities and faith groups, they cannot provide services on the necessary scale. It argues that universal public services were the basis on which the current prosperity enjoyed by developed countries was built.
Yet poverty need not be a barrier to delivery, and many developing countries — such as Sri Lanka, Botswana and Malaysia — have, within a generation, made health and education advances that took industrialised countries more than a century to achieve. In spite of being a poor country with a third of its people living on less than two dollars a day, Sri Lanka provides free healthcare and education to its citizens and has one of the world’s lowest rates of women dying in childbirth.
Every day around the world, 4Â 000 children are killed by diarrhoea, 1Â 400 women die needlessly during pregnancy or childbirth and 100million children, most of them girls, will not go to school. Yet rich countries still spend almost as much on pet food ($40billion) as the $47billion a year it would cost to meet the Millennium Development Goals on health, education, water and sanitation.
Source: In the Public Interest
How the money’s really spent
Health
- Globally there is a shortage of 3,8million health workers — one million of these in Africa — and 2,5million teachers.
- Half of Africa’s medical graduates go to work overseas within five years.
- Women in developing countries have a one-in-four chance of dying from a pregnancy-related cause, compared to one in 1Â 800 in developed countries.
- About 37% of South Africa’s doctors and 7% of nurses and midwives work in developed countries.
- About 300 trained nurses leave South Africa every month — and 6% of all the United Kingdom’s health workers are from South Africa.
- The annual cost to South Africa of training health workers who leave the country is R6billion.
Guns before people
- Many developing countries spend more on the military than education and health combined. Eritrea spends 19,4% of its gross domestic product on the military, but 7,3% on education and health.
- The amount that rich countries spend on fighting HIV/Aids, a disease that claims three million lives a year, represents three days spending on military hardware.
- An average $22billion is spent on arms by countries in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa every year. This sum would enable these countries to put every child in school and to reduce child mortality rates by two-thirds by 2015.
- In sub-Saharan Africa, military expenditure rose by 47% during the late 1990s while life expectancy fell to 46 years.
Education
- About 100million children are not in school; the majority of those are girls.
- Only half of all boys, and even fewer girls, complete primary school in sub-Saharan Africa, and the average 16-year-old girl African has had less than three years of schooling.
- In 2000, 45% of graduating teachers in Zambia died of Aids. Over the next decade, one in three health workers is likely to die of Aids.
- Millions of teachers in poor countries handle classes of up to 100 pupils, in schools with few books and no running water.
Water and sanitation
- One billion people live without clean water, and two billion live without a basic toilet.
- Water-related diseases claim the lives of 6Â 000 children every day.
When governments fail to deliver
- In Nigeria, faith-based organisations provide 60% of healthcare.
- Two-thirds of the primary schools in Malawi are owned by the church.
- In Bangladesh, about one child in four is enrolled in a non-government primary school.
- In South-East Asian cities, non-state water providers serve 20% to 45% of households.
Source: In the Public Interest