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Column: GPP - Australia
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Guest Blog by John Godwin, International Development Consultant & Australia Representative for Aeras, a non-profit product development organization dedicated to the development of effective tuberculosis (TB) vaccines and biologics to prevent TB.
TB should be a priority for AusAID because of the high burden of disease in Asia and the Pacific. Eight low and middle-income countries in the Asia Pacific region – Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam – are among the 22 countries with the highest burdens of TB globally.
Earlier last month, AusAID released a Draft Medical Research Strategy to guide funding of medical research. AusAID’s initial priorities will be funding product development partnerships (PDPs) for malaria and TB research. This is great news and comes at a time when so many other donor governments are cutting back due to the financial downturn.
The current TB vaccine, BCG, has not been effective in curbing the TB epidemic, leaving TB To continue having enormous public health impacts. The spread of drug resistant strains is an alarming development. Globally, approximately 440,000 new cases of multidrug resistant TB (MDR-TB) occur each year, killing more than a third of its victims. Most worryingly, MDR-TB has gone from being the result of poor adherence to frontline drugs, to primary transmission in a significant proportion of cases.The only way to stop the spread of TB is to prevent its emergence. In this regard, the most cost- effective weapon would be a vaccine that prevents adolescents and adults from developing the disease. Newer TB vaccines that will either replace or boost BCG are being developed and a number of these have entered late stage clinical trials. 
The new AusAID Strategy presents an opportunity for Australia to provide leadership in vaccine research. However, concerns have arisen that one aspect of the Draft Strategy may severely limit AusAID’s ability to play a lead role in this critical area. The Draft Strategy proposes a condition that research will only be funded if there is “a short time (up to 5 years) to an outcome for poor people”.
In the vaccine development field, the requirement of a new product in less than five years is unduly restrictive. Imposing a strict five-year timeframe does not take into account the time required to enrol more than 20,000 participants in a Phase III trial and conduct the necessary follow-up. That said, the global epidemic will continue to spread, costing the health system and the global economy billions each year without a vaccine.
Until recently little attention or investment had been devoted to new TB vaccines. However, tremendous progress has been made in the past 10 years. The pipeline has grown from a single vaccine candidate in clinical testing in 2000, to now more than 12. Development of new TB vaccines is at a crucial juncture right now with a number of candidates in late stage trials. With sufficient support from governments, private donors and industry partners, we will be able to sustain this momentum toward an improved vaccine to prevent TB by 2020.
Australia is home to a robust network of TB researchers that can be leveraged to accelerate global TB vaccine development. For example, researchers at the Centenary Institute at Sydney University are providing global leadership in aspects of TB vaccine research and are important partners.
Over the past 25 years, there has been a significant increase in funding for TB research, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the US, UK, Dutch, British, Norwegian,and other European governments. Mass vaccination campaigns would save millions of people from TB-related morbidity and mortality and would benefit economies. It would also protect countries where TB is not currently endemic, for example, Australia, from the threat of drug- resistant TB.
There is a risk that reduced funding for TB vaccine research as a result of reduced donor budgets may see the R&D effort lose momentum. Australian participation alongside other donors in funding the vaccine development effort would help accelerate progress, and build on AusAID’s leadership role in tackling the Asia Pacific region’s major health challenges. With the finalization of the Medical Research Strategy, AusAID should commit funding to the multinational global TB vaccine effort, particularly since almost a third of the world’s MDR-TB burden is in the Western Pacific region.
The world simply cannot afford to not invest in the ultimate weapon against TB – a vaccine.
*Image from Aeras homepage |
Posted by John Godwin in Global Health for column GPP - Australia on Sep 3rd 2012, 13:05 |
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Last Friday Alan Jones once again proved he is a man stuck in times past.
While the women of the world are working hard to address some of the world’s biggest social issues of our time, he has again proven his main contribution to society is misogyny and naysaying.
Responding to an announcement that the Australian Government will invest aid dollars in a Pacific women’s leadership program, Alan Jones’ inferred that Australia shouldn’t support women’s representation in politics... because we’re ‘destroying the joint’.[1]
Women have lead some of the most important political reforms of our generation, and their equal involvement is crucial to continued economic and social progress.
To see the impact of women in politics you need look only to Liberia: where women lead a peace movement that overthrew a dictator and ended a 14 year civil war, and where a female President invested in peace and nation building that cleared $4.9 billion of debt, increased the country’s budget by almost 4 times and earned her the Nobel Peace prize.[2]
Or Egypt where women helped lead the freedom movement which toppled a dictator and demanded their right to meaningful political participation.
And whatever one's political leaning, no one can doubt the impact and dominant political force of Margaret Thatcher .
Around the world women have shown, and continue to show exactly what they are capable of. And investment in women - and women’s participation in business and political leadership - is exactly what we need to address some of the world’s biggest problems, particularly extreme poverty.
The Government’s investment in women’s leadership is exciting news. AusAid has noted that an increase in women’s representation in parliament actually reduces corruption and increases economic growth in the Pacific.[3]
This is exactly what our foreign aid should be doing: building the foundations for a society to trade and effectively govern its way out of poverty.
Leading diplomat, Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan hit the nail on the head when he said “there is no tool for development more effective than the empowerment of women [4]”.
And the world’s richest man, Bill Gates, agrees: “if you’re not fully utilizing half the talent in the country...you’re not going to get too close to the top ten [5].”
Thankfully not all men adopt the same passé mindset of Alan Jones . Men and Women alike have acknowledged the powerful role of women’s participation in politics and leadership.
Powerful and successful women have certainly not been held back by those that wish to hark back to destructive paradigms of the past . Their success and effective political participation has always been the ultimate weapon against the naysayers.
To Alan Jones, I think that the old idiom applies: “those who say we can’t change the world should get out of the way of people already doing it”.
To those who’d like to join those leading the way forward, I invite you to join me in congratulating Julia Gillard on her decision to invest in women’s leadership. You can add your name to our thank you card here.
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On the 4th of July 2012, the Global Poverty Project’s National Director Samah Hadid spoke in The Wheeler Centre’s Intelligence Squared debate on the topic ‘Is foreign aid a waste of money’. This is what she has to say.
If we accept that extreme poverty is wrong, and we are committed to doing something about it, then we can’t possibly believe that foreign aid is a waste of money.
Foreign aid is writing incredible success stories - helping hard working people escape the cycle of poverty.
We have been lucky in the lottery of birth. But 1.4 billion people aren’t so lucky, and their lives are being constrained as a result. Not because they aren’t trying hard enough to change their situation, but because they’re working in broken systems.
Let’s think about what this would mean for a minute, by applying it to our own lives. If we were born into poverty:
- As babies we would have been vulnerable to basic, but life-threatening health issues like measles, malaria and diarrhoea,
- Many of us wouldn’t have a primary education. If we were lucky enough to have a school near our community, our families would have struggled to pay fees, and women would have been less likely than their male siblings to be sent to school.
- If we wanted to start a family of our own, we’d face a shortage of skilled health workers and birth attendants - leaving our families vulnerable to life-threatening complications during pregnancy and childbirth, and
- Any of us hoping to build businesses or trade goods to build ourselves a better future would rely on the presence of local infrastructure to get us to markets - basic things like bridges and roads, that may not exist.
These issues - the absence of basics like health services, education and infrastructure - are stifling possibility in more than 1.4 billion people. They’re basic issues, and issues that our aid helps address.
In just the past four years, Australia’s aid has done things like:
- Vaccinate 900,000 children in Papua New Guinea,
- Helped seven million children into schools in Afghanistan - providing upcoming generations with crucial education opportunities
- Supported maternal and child health services for more than 27 million people in Bangladesh - leading to a 40% reduction in maternal deaths over the past decade, and
- Supported transport infrastructure in Vanuatu - providing job opportunities, and access to important services, such as health services and schools.
These are just a handful of success stories – a small part of an international aid system that has saved more than 10 million lives in the past 10 years.
These kinds of life-changing opportunities make our aid program an incredibly important investment.
Aid helps write incredible success stories, and helps hard working people escape the cycle of poverty. It is a crucial component in a set of measures providing our world’s most vulnerable with the opportunity to escape extreme poverty. It is helping vulnerable communities deal with the impacts of natural disasters, famine, and the unpredictable effects of climate change. It fosters trade: ensuring a more literate and healthy population that can attract investment, and participate in markets. It also contributes to good governance, and reduced corruption - because educating a population allows them to better hold their government to account.
Effective aid also helps people work their way out of extreme poverty so they won’t need aid in the future. It can help kick start economic development and better governance, so that countries can graduate from aid – as Brazil, Panama, Vietnam and South Korea did. South Korea has even transitioned from being an aid recipient to an aid giving country. And it was able to successfully enter the trade system because of aid assistance and investment in education.
Aid helps create the crucial preconditions to communities escaping poverty. It’s not the answer to extreme poverty - but this complex issue has no single solution. Instead, we need to combine targeted, effective aid with things like trade, good governance and debt forgiveness, to ensure people born into broken systems will have the opportunity to escape extreme poverty.
We know that things like trade are important in helping lift economic conditions in poor countries. But trade cannot do the job of fighting poverty alone. To allow trade to happen, the world’s poor need to be able to make investments - into things like credit markets, infrastructure and education. And if we’re going to alleviate, rather than exacerbate the suffering of the poor, our trade markets need to be fair and equitable - which isn’t currently the case.
An issue that often comes up in discussions of foreign aid investment is corruption.
We agree, corruption is an issue, and one that we should be working to tackle. But let’s put this issue in context: in the past 4 years of Australia’s aid program, corruption has affected just 0.017% of aid dollars. To use it as an excuse to remove support for the whole program is completely unreasonable. We shouldn’t be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
If our concern with such corruption is directed where it should be – the fact that it directs money away from the world’s poorest people – then we should be talking about corporate tax dodging - which costs developing countries more than $160 billion dollars; more than the $120 billion that is given in aid.
We should be addressing corruption, and we can do that by supporting the types of things we know make a difference - like education, something that aid supports.
We know Australia’s aid is improving literacy - investing in a generation who will be better equipped to hold their leaders to account. It’s also improving governance, accountability and delivery of services by working with governments and communities to ensure money is spent wisely.
If we’re committed to addressing the injustice of extreme poverty, then aid is a crucial investment. It pays for the things that are the preconditions to escaping poverty, allows people the chance get a foot onto the ladder of development, and saves lives. And that is why foreign aid is not a waste of money. |
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.jpg) It's Friday night in Australia, and this year’s official Live Below the Line week is coming to an end.
But the challenge isn’t over.
Because our challenge is to build the movement for change.
And when building a movement, advocates are crucial.
This week Live Below the Line participants caught a glimpse of the complexities of the issue of extreme poverty: we saw how a lack of money, resources and choice can intersect to constrain your everyday life.
For the thousands taking the challenge this week has been tough. Yet we haven’t even come close to experiencing the real challenges of extreme poverty. And we never will; because we can never truly understand what it means to face systemic issues like limited access to health care, poor sanitation infrastructure, corruption and unfair trade. These issues, and more, all play a key role in perpetuating poverty and inequality.
They’re complex... but they’re not unchangeable.
In the last three decades the world has halved extreme poverty. Together, we are making progress.
Thanks to the support of Live Below the Line donors, the Global Poverty Project Australia will be able to invest in expanding crucial education and campaign work in three key areas that contribute to ending extreme poverty: preventing disease, supporting fair trade, and increasing transparency.
We know that investment in these areas can change lives. We also know that the conversations and advocacy of our supporters can multiply our impact in these areas. Not only now, but next week, next month and next year.
As we continue to campaign for the end of extreme poverty, your involvement as an advocate will be invaluable. Please continue taking action, and encourage those around you to also stand up for change.
This Tuesday’s announcement - that our major political parties are breaking their promise on foreign aid - demonstrates just how important our work as advocates is.
Thanks to everyone who took part. Not only the team who have made the campaign possible, but to the people who took this campaign into their schools, workplaces, family homes and universities; and stood up for change. Your efforts are helping build the movement for change.
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If you’re one of the more than 7,000 Australians currently Living Below the Line, you're probably starting to feel the effects of living on $2 worth of food and drink a day. I know I’m feeling tired, hungry, and if we’re being honest - a little bit grumpy as well.
But imagine if you had to add sick to this list as well.
When you survive on the equivalent of $2 a day; you can't afford for things to go wrong.
And yet something as simple as a mosquito bite can change your life.
For the 1.4 billion people living below the extreme poverty line (that's with the equivalent of $2AUD a day to cover all their daily needs, not just food); illness is a very real and constant threat.
Below the line, illness can be disastrous.
For starters, medical care is not always readily available. To access treatment you may need to find (and pay for) transport to a hospital. Often this means getting to the next major city - which can be several hundred kilometres away. The time you spend getting to the hospital then means you’re kept away from your work - and that don’t have the opportunity to earn your income for that day. Once you find medical care; that doesn’t mean its free... or even cheap. And you may be faced with a choice between eating, and buying medication. Even worse, if the person that illness strikes is the family breadwinner, the illness may leave them unable to work.
Unfortunately, limited access to basic health care and vaccinations means that people in extreme poverty are vulnerable to a myriad of illnesses - including many that young Australians have been lucky enough to be able to forget.
Let's take polio as an example.
Most young Australians will think of polio as only a vaccination. But for the poorest of the poor this is a disease that still causes paralysis and death in young children. Due to global collaboration over the past three decades, polio is now only endemic in three countries worldwide. But it continues to affect marginalised children: those in minority groups, mobile populations, remote villages or, conversely, in dense urban slums.
Once an extremely poor child gets polio, their entire future changes. Their ability to work and to access education is limited; even their chances of getting married decreases dramatically. Instead of being able to help their family work their way out of extreme poverty, their disability can lead them to be seen as a financial burden in families that are often already overburdened: deepening their cycle of poverty.
This is why the Global Poverty Project campaigns on preventable disease - we believe that no child should suffer or die from a disease we can easily and cheaply prevent. Eradicating polio, for example, would mean that more children would grow up to lead full and productive lives. And that's one effective way to reduce extreme poverty. |
Posted by Lauren O'Connor in Poverty for column GPP - Australia on May 10th 2012, 03:00 |
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