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IF: What you achieved in the fight against hunger

Since January, thousands of Save the Children supporters have campaigned hard as part of the Enough Food for Everyone IF movement.

Together, we demanded the Prime Minister and his fellow G8 leaders took decisive action on hunger.

You emailed your MPs, signed and shared petitions, and 45,000 of you gathered at the Big IF London rally on Hyde Park on Saturday 8 June.

Now, as the G8 leaders head back to their capitals, it’s time to ask: what did we achieve?

The answer is simple: millions of children’s lives saved.

Millions saved

The London Hunger Summit on 8 June saw £2.7 billion pledged by governments, companies and charities towards the fight against hunger.

This money will fund plans to combat malnutrition in 20 of the world’s most poverty-stricken countries and will save 1.7 million lives.

But new money to pay for live-saving nutrition projects wasn’t our only demand.

We called for tough action on tax dodging by unscrupulous companies and individuals – scandalous behaviour that deprives the poorest countries of billions they could use to feed their people.

Progress on tax

On Saturday, as a result of pressure from all of you, a historic deal was struck with British tax havens such as Jersey,  Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.

They will now be forced to share information with developing countries – information that has been kept secret for generations.

And yesterday at the G8 Summit itself, we built on that progress by securing a global deal on helping developing countries collect the taxes they are owed.

Both of these achievements will help poor countries claim billions of pounds in tax that belongs to them.

We can be proud

Without your support, we would never have secured anything like the £2.7 billion to tackle hunger that was committed at last week’s Hunger Summit and tax dodging wouldn’t even have been on the G8 agenda.

Together, we can be immensely proud of our role in saving the lives of so many children.

It’s proof that campaigning works: that when enough of us speak out, our leaders listen and move in the right direction.

From all of us at Save the Children: thank you.

Interested in how in learning more about how a campaign like IF is put together and developed? Our policy and advocacy director Brendan Cox was one of the main organisers. Read his blog on what worked and what didn’t.

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