America and Britain should join forces to end poverty: both nations "believe that peace and security are the foundation of any progress … that creating the right climate for economic growth … is the best way … to raise the finances needed to defeat poverty."

How are we going to do something about all this? The answer is by politics--in our countries and in developing ones. That is what the ONE campaign here in the U.S. and the Make Poverty History campaign in the UK are all about: they are the global equivalents of the social reformers of the past centuries. Great Britain made a start on its contribution a year ago at the G8 in Gleneagles, as it agreed to $50,000,000,000 a year in extra aid by 2010, with half to go to Africa. Such aid has helped double the number of children in school in Mozambique: abolish health fees while doubling clinic attendance in Uganda: and, within a five-year span, get an additional 7,500,000 access to safe water and sanitation in Bangladesh; as well as support an eightfold increase in the number of people on AIDS treatment in sub-Saharan Africa since 2003.

Together, we also arranged an agreement on debt cancellation worth $50,000,000,000. It is in the process of happening now in almost 20 countries, thus helping Zambia to provide free health care in rural areas for the first time, and Tanzania to build more than 30,000 new classrooms.

At the UN Millennium Summit, all nations agreed that states have a responsibility to protect their citizens from genocide and, when they fail to do so, the international community must act. We also agreed on a new Human Rights Commission, and a Peace Building Commission. In March, we set up a new UN fund to speed up our response to humanitarian emergencies. We also have agreed to a plan to get AIDS treatment to all who need it by 2010. We have worked together on all of these things because we know that, without a just world, we will not have a stable world.

Do commitments really help?

The task now is to turn those commitments into practical help. So, what do we need to do? The first step is to recognize that, for development to take place, there must be peace and security. Not long ago, I was in Lashkar Gah in southern Afghanistan, a country in which one in tour children never live to celebrate his or her fifth birthday, and where life expectancy is 44 years of age--the same as in Britain 100 years ago. This is a nation where, as the director of education described to me, intimidation by the Taliban has closed 60 out of 224 schools in Helmand. Teachers are threatened and, in some cases, murdered because they insist on instructing children. Their greatest crime of all? Teaching girls. I also was in Somalia at a refugee camp at a place called Wajid, home to 11,000 people who fled the countryside when the drought killed their animals and shriveled their crops--a sign of the world to come, perhaps, if we do not deal with climate change. Yet, in this camp, I saw rows of children--as many girls as boys--keen and enthusiastic as any pupils I have ever met, enjoying, for the very first time in their lives, the chance to go to school. So, it is possible to create something good out of something terrible.

It is places and experiences like these that have taught me, taught all of us, why development--individuals being able, by their own efforts, to change their lives for the better--is so important and, why, unless we tackle poverty, injustice, and inequality, we never will have a safe and secure world in which to live, regardless of where it is we happen to call home.