Development Through Foreign Aid Requires Global Cooperation
The GAVI Alliance pledging conference is "being seen as a litmus test of how well aid can survive in the age of austerity," columnist Madeleine Bunting writes in a Guardian commentary, addressing how foreign aid is viewed as "soft power [to] establish influence and spread values which is often more useful than diplomacy or defence in a post-cold war world."
"The challenge ahead is all about communication, finding powerful ways to explain to a sceptical electorate that development issues such as feeding the world, water and health in the end affect us all. Stability, peace, prosperity: these cannot be simply national projects; global co-operation is a survival strategy. Four million children's lives saved by lunchtime would be a good morning's work," she concludes (6/12).
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