But despite organising the meeting the French government has donated around $10 million to the aid effort, lagging far behind Britain’s recent $85 million donation. Italy – the host of today’s summit and Europe’s fourth largest economy- has contributed a mere $900,000.
The inefficiencies and complications caused by the many funding streams that developing countries are meant to negotiate is pretty well known. Any moves to bring them together into a more co-ordinated system with one point of negotiation and one reporting and monitoring system is a very good idea.
Very often, researchers write and discuss their papers between themselves, and their fabulous analysis fails to translate into practice and is not taken up by policy makers.
If we want to help children and their families, it’s important that we don’t fall into this trap and produce work/ papers/ tools that are useful rather than gathering dust in some basement cupboard.
The G8 summit has now drawn to a close and the Deerhurst resort in Muskoka will be getting back to normal. The world leaders flew back to Toronto by helicopter with Obama and Cameron flying together to start their bilateral meeting. Apparently Cameron and Merkel will be watching the England v Germany World Cup match together tomorrow and the press are invited can’t imagine he’ll look anything other than awkward!
Yesterday the Commonwealth Health Ministers had their meeting before the start of the World Health Assembly. The Commonwealth is a strange beast, a range of English-speaking countries, many of them former British colonies, that still hold together as a group.
The 27th of April 2010 will be remembered as a special day in, and for, Sierra Leone.
Not only because the 27th of April is independence day, but because - and most importantly - it is the day that going to the doctor will become free for children under five and pregnant women, and new mothers.
The journey from Addis Ababa, where colleagues from across Africa have been meeting to plan our EVERY ONE campaign to Dessie, where Save the Children has health programmes, is 400 km and took 9 hours. This is even longer than usual due to the huge amounts of road-building going on, even on a Sunday.
Teaching children in a languages they don’t use at home is causing big problems with school dropouts, exam failures and pupils not achieving their potential, particularly in rural areas of developing countries. Find out what’s being done to tackle the issue and add your voice to the debate on what should be done to stop language being a barrier to learning for millions of children.
