UK charity calls for more international funding for education, health care

The international community is throwing away the lives of millions of children by failing to invest in basic care, the British charity Save the Children has said. It asserted that massive investment in education and health care was needed if the lives of children in third world countries were to be improved. The warning coincided with the launch on Friday of the United Nations International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. Save the Children called on the UK government and international organisations to boost their funding for education and health care overseas, noting that only 4.8 percent of UK government aid went towards basic health care and just 2.6 percent towards education. It went on to observe that the World Bank allocated a mere 1.9 percent of its funding towards basic health care, and the EU only 2.3 percent. In a report, entitled "Paying the Price", the charity painted a grim picture of the impact of underfunding in the basic services of a number of developing countries. Despite the many pledges made at countless world summits, for millions of children and their families basic services remained nonexistent or unaffordable, it said. The charity also argued that some countries were just too poor to provide adequate services without international aid. "Despite Ethiopia spending at least 20 percent of its national budget on health and education, this amounts to just US $1.50 per person on health," John Graham, head of Save the Children-UK in Ethiopia, revealed. "In Ethiopia, the majority of children and their families are too poor to be sick," he asserted. New statistics compiled by the charity show that 51 percent of Ethiopians are excluded from health care because of the high cost of medicines. Save the Children estimated that the cost of a prescription in Ethiopia would equate to paying more than $1,000 in western countries. "Save the Children believes this is unacceptable," Graham stressed. "We want donor governments and international financial institutions to make long-term commitments to increase investment in health and education services until they are available to all children in developing countries." Save the Children also called on the governments of developed states to announce when they will meet the agreed target of 0.7 percent of their gross national product for overseas development, with at least 0.1 percent of this allocated to basic health care. It said the UK alone should boost its aid budget by $500 million for basic education and reach $1 billion for health by 2006. The charity also warned that aid budgets should not be diverted from public health services to the development of private sector services.