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."

Hilary Benn

I WANT TO REFLECT not only on the challenges that the U.S. and Great Britain face in fighting poverty on this small and fragile planet of ours, but also on the way in which we do it and how it is seen by others. One of the things I have learned is that you do not spend long talking about development--or, come to think of it, foreign policy, climate change, trade, security, or just about anything else--without the conversation turning to the U.S. This is a sign, of course, of the preeminence of America--the most powerful nation in the world and the owner of the largest economy--which invites expectation and excoriation in equal measure. Now, I realize that this may be sensitive territory for a foreigner to enter, so I will begin by setting out my modest credentials and my reasons for wanting to do so.

I am half American. My mother is from Ohio. She came from Cincinnati. Ohio is known as the "Mother of Presidents," and that certainly is true for Republicans, as none ever has entered the White House without winning the state. The Queen City, of course, is home to that baseball team with such a colorful and successful history, the Cincinnati Reds, a name that gave us great comfort as we were growing up, reflecting as it did both Mum's home town and the color of the family's politics--on the British side, at least!

Her ancestors came from France--they were Huguenots--and from Ireland. One was fleeing religious persecution and the other seeking a better life, like so many who have crossed the Atlantic over the centuries, and like so many millions of people in the developing world today. In 1812, the family--14 of them--set out from the East Coast in two covered wagons and, six weeks later, reached Butler County, Ohio, where they built their first homestead. Seven generations later, I was born to a Cincinnatian in West London, and that is how I come to stand here today.

That heritage--our interdependence--has led me to reflect on where half of what I am comes from, and how the country that makes up the other half sees the U.S. We have, of course, a great deal in common.

That wonderful guide for Gls coming to Britain during World War II reminded them that "our common speech, our common law, and our ideals of religious freedom were all bought from Britain when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock." Mind you, George Bernard Shaw had other ideas when he talked of "two nations divided by a common language," but there is no doubting the bond between us.

More than anything else, however, because of the U.S.'s influence and position, what America says and what America does really matter. Moreover, I realize just how proud Americans are of their traditions, passion for liberty and freedom, and open society. So, it always is difficult for any of us when we come to discover that others do not all see us in the way in which we see ourselves. That was one of the questions the U.S. had to ask itself in the wake of 9/11. In talking about it with my American relatives, I shared their shock at what had occurred and their fear for the future. We felt the same after the July 7, 2005, attack on the London transport system, as much because the bombers came from Britain, three of them from the constituency--or district--that I represent in Leeds. We know that, in various parts of the world, there is resentment against both our nations and, the West in general from certain factions, some of whom invest great hope in our power to change things and yet measure that power against their own powerlessness. This is something that we have to face up to as we remain resolute in defense of the common values that we hold dear.

Our growing interdependence as a world means that we increasingly are affected by what happens in other countries, including conflict, terrorism, and religious extremism. We all are concerned to ensure our security, but we cannot cut ourselves off. We have global responsibilities, and also a duty to use our influence responsibly and with understanding of how others see us. It is not an easy task.

This global interdependence--and the link between security and development--is one of the reasons why fighting global poverty has moved from the margins of politics 50 years ago to its heart. I am greatly struck, as I listen to the debate about foreign assistance here in the U.S. and see the structural changes that Pres. George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have made, by how similar our analysis is concerning the challenge of fighting extreme poverty, even if our approaches differ.

We both believe that peace and security are the foundation of any progress--that good governance and fighting corruption matter. That creating the right climate for economic growth--including by agreeing to a fairer world trade deal--is the best way, in the long term, to raise the finances needed to defeat poverty. Indeed, aid works to help build that capacity. Such debt relief lifts from countries that awful choice between paying the debt or paying the doctors and nurses who will save lives. Providing education, clean water, and health care for all the world's children and defeating AIDS is the great moral and practical challenge of our generation, and when crisis does strike--drought, flood, etc.--we all have a duty to help.

Pres. Bush recently commented that "Fighting global poverty reflects this country's values.... We know that when a neighbor needs assistance, we have an obligation to help provide it." The President is right. The truth is this: Here we are at the beginning of the 21st century, and we know that, in the developing world, pregnancy and childbirth claim the life of a woman every minute--women who die alone and afraid on the floor of a darkened hut with no midwife or doctor to help them. We also know that 6,000 children will die today from a lack of clean water to drink; each and every year, malaria kills 1,000,000 people, tuberculosis, 2,000,000, AIDS, 3,000,000--every one a human life extinguished, potential unrealized.

Because we see these things, we cannot claim any more that we do not know what is going on--and we have a choice. Either we say: We are sorry about the condition of humankind, but we cannot do anything about it; or we ask: Can we do something about this? Well, I think we can. It is the story of my country. Go back 200 years to a time of enormous change in British society--the movement from the land to the towns and cities as the Industrial Revolution created a technology that transformed the world and begot great social reformers who helped to transform things, pioneers of local government who built the water pipes and the sewers which did so much to improve life expectancy, and the dreamers who dared to believe that one day every child in Britain would be able to go to school.

It was the same process here in America. The Founding Fathers created checks and balances in a Federal system that made local government the building block of a great nation--because power always should lie with the people. The U.S.'s tremendous social reformers, from Harriet Tubman helping to bring slaves north to freedom through the Underground Railroad (which, incidentally, passed through my mother's hometown), to Susan B. Anthony, the leader of the women's suffrage movement, being found guilty of voting illegally for a Re publican presidential candidate, to Rosa Parks refusing to be treated as a second-class citizen, serve as inspiration to us all. That is how both our countries changed and, the troth is, we are going through exactly the same process now, but on a global scale.

The progress has been remarkable. For instance, in the past 40 years, life expectancy in the developing world has increased by 25%. In the past 30 years, illiteracy has fallen by half. In the past 20 years, 400.000,000 individuals have been lifted out of absolute poverty. We have beaten smallpox, and we nearly have done the same with polio. Yet, there is so much more to do, and the task has become more difficult due to three key factors: climate change (least caused by the countries that will be worst affected by it), world population (projected to increase 50% over the next two generations), and the mass migration from rural to urban areas (by 2020, most people in Asia will be living in urban centers, and the same will be true of Africa 10 years later).

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.

We have learned that preventing conflict is better than picking up the pieces afterwards. Doubters need look only as far as Darfur. We know that post-conflict countries have a 50% chance of starting fighting again within five years, so we need to work with them for more than just the short term. We have to build long-term stability as a foundation for future prosperity. This involves providing basic services like education and health care, and creating a sense of hope via good government, including through building institutions.

We must understand that if we ignore certain countries--failed states like Afghanistan, Liberia, and Somalia--they can become safe havens for terrorism. Quite frankly, we must work together better and I hope the Peace Building Commission will help us do that. We need to ensure that our agreement on "Responsibility to Protect" turns into a willingness to act. We have to do more to reduce the proliferation of small arms and light weapons. We need an International Arms Trade Treaty, and we must help continents like Africa build their own peacekeeping capacity. All of this will require a more effective United Nations.

The second challenge is to invest in helping developing countries build their own capacity. Our aid can help poor people go to school and stay healthy--both of which are vital to their economic development. Our support, however, needs to be long term and predictable if governments are to be able to invest in their people. Take education, for instance. The U.S. believes that education is the best investment a society can make, and I welcome First Lady Laura Bush's leadership on this issue.

Life-saving schools

Going to school saves lives--an African woman who does so is 50% more likely to have her child immunized. Being in school fights AIDS. In Swaziland, two-thirds of girls attending class are free of HIM but the reverse is true for those who don't. Education makes the economy grow--an extra year of education for a girl can raise her future income by 10 to 20%. The abolition of primary school fees in Kenya helped an additional 1,500,000 children into a classroom and, in Zambia, increased girls' enrollment from around two-thirds to over 80% in just two years. Burundi is the latest country to do it; 300,000 additional children turned up.

Political will backed by aid is making a difference. The UK has just committed to spend $15,000,000,000 over the next 10 years to support long-term education plans in poor countries. We expect at least 22 nations to have prepared plans by the end of this year, and they will be asking donors for help in funding them.

I think this is an issue on which the U.S. could lead the world, and is a perfect opportunity for the Millennium Challenge Account to provide major long-term funding. America could turn its "No Child Left Behind" campaign into a global initiative on behalf of the world's poorest children.

Third, we need to work in a way that helps build this capacity. It is a lack of capacity that is the biggest cause of death and the absence of school places. How much help we give and how we give it really do matter. With great power comes great responsibility, but 1 also believe that with great wealth should come great generosity. These are British values--seen most clearly when disaster strikes--and they are American values, too.

The most prominent private expression of this has been the work of Bill and Melinda Gates and, most recently, Warren Buffet, who is giving away most of his fortune. These are acts no different in kind, only in scale, from those of many millions of Americans who give so generously to those in need. All have made a huge difference. It was French statesman Alexis de Tocqueville who, nearly 200 years ago, identified this characteristic: "When an American needs the assistance of his fellows, it's very rare that it be refused."

As governments, we have to do the same--and we are. Over the past decade, UK aid has more than trebled. Under this Administration, American aid has more than doubled; in new ways, too, with PEPFAR and the Millennium Challenge Account. It is taxpayers' dollars and pounds that are dropping the debt and bringing new money for health and education. However, is it enough? I do not think so. In the UK, we are committed to achieving the long-held global target of allocating 0.7% of our national wealth in aid by 2013. Europe has committed to do this by 2015; that is an extra $100,000,000,000 a year. If the U.S. did the same, it would mean yet another $100,000,000,000 a year. Think what a difference that would make.

The other issue here is how we work. Let me take two examples: the way we give our aid and the fight against HIV and ADS. In the UK, we now ask three questions of our development partners: Are you serious about reducing poverty? Do you uphold human rights and international obligations? Do you promote transparency, reform of public financial management, good governance, and the assurance that the money goes where it is intended?

Based on the answers, we distribute our aid in different ways. In Zimbabwe, we do not give aid directly to the government, but we do provide food and run an AIDS program. In Tanzania, on the other hand, we give a lot of our aid in the form of support to the government's budget--to its treasury. I understand the arguments about budget support; we in the UK have them, too. There always is concern over tracking where the dollars and pounds went. The fact that the U.S. does not engage in budget support is one of the differences in our approaches, and it does separate America from other donors. In the right circumstances, though, it is quite a useful tool, as the recent independent evaluation carried out for the UK by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development shows. One of its benefits is that it helps to build that very capacity and promote improved financial management, something that is at the heart of the U.S.'s policy.

If our shared goal of accountable government is to be realized so that people in developing countries look to their own governments to sort out their problems, and not us, then we need to help build the capacity to do exactly that, which is why I was so heartened to hear Ambassador Randall L. Tobias' recent speech to the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid, where he spoke about the parallel systems of service delivery that have "allowed governments to shirk their responsibility.... Citizens must understand that their governments are responsible; they must make demands of their governments and reject excuses for failure."

Fighting AIDS also is an issue of capacity, and it is one where the U.S. has shown great leadership. We are the two biggest donors in the global fight against AIDS. The U.S., like the UK, understands that it is vital to make sure that the way we offer help actually assists those fighting this disease on the ground; is a big supporter of the Global Fund; and recognizes the need to do more to help countries build their health care--doctors, nurses, drags, and clinics--if AIDS is to be defeated.

On some other issues, however--abstinence and condoms, come to mind--we have a different approach. I agree that there is good evidence that fewer sexual partners and delaying starting sex help reduce AIDS, but the truth is, not everyone can, or is able to, abstain from sex: some women sell sex for money or food; there are people who inject themselves with drugs using infected needles and then engage in reckless sex: and some men have sex with other men. Now, I know that these are difficult and embarrassing issues for some human beings and some societies, but people should not die because human beings like having sex. Embarrassment is temporary, while death is permanent. We therefore need to be open and honest, fight stigma, and give individuals the knowledge and the means to protect themselves if we are to win this fight.

Fourth, progress in developing countries will depend, above all, on good governance. This is about the capacity of governments to ensure security, be able to get things done, and give people the chance to be heard and to respond to what they want. It is about creating a climate in which people, local and from abroad, will want to come to invest their money, ensuring the role of law through effective policing and fighting corruption.

The UK employs proper safeguards and a rigorous system of audit and inspection. When we see a problem, we take tough action to prevent any repetition and send a clear message that corruption will not be tolerated. Those guilty of criminal offenses should be prosecuted and punished. Yet, some argue we should suspend our aid where problems arise. I do not agree. Why should children be denied an education, or mothers health care, or HIV-positive persons AIDS treatment just because some in their government are corrupt? If all poor people lived in well-governed countries, fighting corruption would be much easier--but they do not. Poor people live in nations affected by conflict, with few resources, and poorly paid public sector workers, and where governments and institutions often are weakest.

Walking away from our responsibilities to poor people is not the right thing to do. If necessary, we will change the way we give our aid but, if we are going to help weak and fragile states transform themselves into well-governed states, then we need to work with them and not around them.

Overcoming corruption

Corruption is, however, the result of a failure of governance, and the best check on corruption is to strengthen the governance with which to fight it. That means encouraging a demand for good governance by supporting civil society, the media, parliaments, trade unions, and communities so that people's voices are heard and governments are held to account. In the end, it is politics that provide the means by which those who govern--and those who give their consent to be governed--reach decisions on what is to be done.

Fifth, economic growth is the best way to reduce poverty. It is how we did it in our own countries. It also is the best way to end the dependency of poor countries on aid. Poor people are the private sector--the farmers, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, etc.--and they also are the people we are trying to help.

We know that obtaining a decent job is their single best chance of escaping poverty. The U.S. is using its funding to help countries trade more and to invest in the infrastructure necessary to do that. That aid is helping to increase growth--and it is a UK priority, too. However, it is very hard to trade when the rules are unfair. That is why I am pleased that Pres. Bush has said that the U.S. is ready to eliminate all tariffs and subsidies to trade. I share his view that the time has come for all of the world's richest countries to make these tough decisions.

In the President's words, "Now is the time for the world to come together, not only for the benefit of our own economies, but as an important part of the strategy to reduce poverty around the world." What better way to start that process than by ending the tariffs on the goods we import from the world's poorest countries. The WTO must agree to a credible timetable for moving from 97% market access to 100%. I find it hard to see how we can justify putting up barriers to the world's poorest countries. In the U.S., dairy products receive a tariff of almost 300%; in the EU, rice is covered by 39 separate tariff lines. We also have to move on cotton, where subsidies--$2,000.000,000 a year in the U.S. and almost $1,000,000,000 in the EU--are making life really hard for 12,000,000 poor people in West Africa.

Finally, on this list of things to do, we have to act to stop climate change. This and the depletion of natural resources will be the ultimate test of good global governance. Sea level rise, too much or too little rain, and more frequent storms will lead to mass migration, fragile economies being undermined, water and food shortages and, potentially, wars. Agreeing on a stabilization target--what rise in temperature the Earth can cope with--and then dividing up the CO: emissions we can absorb will be the greatest challenge of all. As the developing world's need for energy increases, we will have to help these nations invest in cleaner forms of energy supply, including through the World Bank's Energy Investment Framework, as well as support them on adaptation and mitigation.

The task is enormous, but we know in our hearts that it must be done. Because defeating poverty is the moral and practical challenge of our generation, and one which our two countries, for reasons of a shared history and shared values, should--and must--rise to. Just think what we could achieve if we acted together. That really would be a historic alliance across all ocean that so many have crossed in search of freedom and a better life. Like my forebears--and yours--they carried with them a burning hope that they could change things for the better. That same hope should inspire us to accept the responsibility that has fallen to us, as together we seek to honor their memory, and play our part in building that better world and passing it on to those who will come after us.

Hilary Benn is the United Kingdom's Secretary of the Department of International Development. This article is adapted from a speech delivered at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C.

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