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With a hunger crisis sweeping across the Sahel affecting eight African countries and putting the fragile existences of a million children in jeopardy now may seem a strange time to be talking about the remarkable progress for the world's poorest children that has been achieved over the past 20 years.
But new independent research by the Overseas Development Institute has found that as a result of international aid together with five other key factors, over four million fewer children under five are dying each year than in 1990. According to the report published yesterday by Save the Children, between 1999 and 2009, 56 million more children were enrolled in school, and damage to children's physical and mental development (stunting) because of malnutrition almost halved between 1990 and 2008. What's more, a hundred and thirty one countries now have over 90% immunisation coverage for diphtheria, tetanus and major preventable childhood diseases such as measles, compared to just 63 in 1990.
So why, if development works and such progress has been made, are 300 children in the world still dying from hunger every hour and why is West Africa facing yet another devastating hunger crisis?
There is, in fact, no contradiction between the remarkable progress made in improving children's lives over the last two decades and the fact that there is still a great distance to travel. The current humanitarian emergency in the Sahel is rooted in many factors - political and economic as well as climactic and environmental - but it also offers some stark lessons about the need for effective long-term development.
Food crises do not occur overnight but build slowly over months or even years and well-planned and adequately resourced development programmes are essential not only for wider progress but also to ensure populations are resilient in the face of the type of drought currently gripping the Sahel.
It is clear from this new research that the greatest progress for children occurs where governments take a lead in providing and regulating programmes and services. But even where there is good governance and strong political leadership overseas, aid remains crucial. Aid buys the vaccines, pays for the building materials to build schools and pays for midwives to be trained.
Botswana, for example, has seen a huge reduction in children born with HIV thanks to a programme to reduce mother-to-child transmission, paid for by aid. In Bangladesh sustained investment in child health funded by donations from international agencies and governments including the UK, resulted in a significant reduction in child mortality.
With Britain in economic difficulties and the country experiencing cuts across a range of public services it is inevitable that tough questions will be asked about how our country spends its money and how much aid Britain can afford to give. But no matter what hardships we in Britain face, they do not compare with those confronting children in the developing world. And this report finds that "development assistance plays a key role in improving children's wellbeing".
Our investment is making a difference and needs to continue and improve if we are to continue the progress of the last 20 years and ensure that children in 20 years time will not still face the kind of food crisis now threatening their lives across West Africa.
The generosity of the British people has helped transform millions of young lives. The UK's aid programme has made a clear and measurable difference. British aid vaccinates one child every two seconds, saving a staggering 1.4 million lives over the next five years.
For the past 82 years the British government has given overseas aid to save lives and support long-term development overseas. For 82 years the vast majority of British people have supported this policy and felt it the right thing to do. In today's world of wealth and technological advancement there is really no excuse for allowing children to starve.
Preventing it requires well directed development aid focused on the poorest and most vulnerable as well as humanitarian intervention. This latest research shows the remarkable difference our generosity has made. This is something we should all feel proud of and be proud to continue.
Matthew Frost: Ending the Hunger Games
Christina Patterson: Africa and the Aid Conundrum
Johnny West: The Story of Niger, or How Not to Have an Oil Boom while your People Starve
Is sustainable agriculture possible in the Sahel?
Lutheran World Relief Responds to Looming Food Crisis in West Africa
'We couldn't even eat the seeds': Drought affecting millions in Africa's Sahel
Let's give away some more money. Gotta keep the bureaucrats busy and pay their fat wages and benefits.
Instead of feeding these deprived masses, we should be educating them to comprehend they simply cannot keep on producing children that simply add to their already unacceptable burdens of starvation, lack of arable lands, and water shortage.
I cannot grasp how millions can be given in aid to what is little more than waste lands, with no prospect of ever pulling these folk up from absolute poverty. If we provide water plant, all this will do is deplete the water table below ground.
Like oil, these aquifers are finite, and once they are sucked dry, what then, especially if the new found water gives a level of perceived security, leading to increased birth rates, with more surviving, due to better overall conditions resulting from that water?.
The degree of suffering will then be far more intense than the developed nations will EVER be able to tackle, no matter how much cash is thrown at it.
Targeted aid has some value, but only if coupled to targeted end aims. Provision of food and water are not sensible targets, I have to say.
Staving off the inevitable is false economy and in the long run, and simply cruel in the false promise held out.
When I was young we were urged to send CARE packages to Europe to help the people devastated by WW2. Within a few years that was not necessary because the people of Europe had rebuilt their economy, were growing their own food on their own farms and had built factories in which they could produce what they needed. Now Europe is the (despite recent problems) the richest, most civilized, and most politically stable part of the world.
Why is that? Because they had the good sense as individuals and as a society to limit the number of children they had and to spend more effort in educating those children.
In many cities around the world the homes of the rich are surrounded by endless areas of slums where people live in utter poverty. Why? Because they have more children than they can support. Because they lack the resources to feed, cloth, house, and educate their children.
Sending them food may help in the short run, but all that the food aid and development aid of the last 60 years has accomplished is that from a few tens of millions living in poverty to over a half-billion living in misery. Unless you can persuade people to understand that actions have consequences they will continue to overrun their resources and depend on hand-outs from the prudent.
That said, we will soon have millions starving here in America, so the charity organizations might consider how to address the needs of those unfortunate folks here at home - people who will be starving because corrupt politicians and businessmen have - together - selfishly caused most of our nation's woes. Meanwhile, in the US, we still throw out enough food each day to feed several nations.
What we need to do to completely eliminate the subsidies paid to agribusinesses. By subsidizing corn and soybeans here we distort the market all over the world. Poor farmers cannot sell their crops at a price that will allow them to survive because American agribusinesses can undersell them in their own countries due to these subsidies.
We need to eliminate all the CAFOs in this country. They are destroying whole communities. Each one generates such immense quantities of pollution that the land around them for miles around becomes unlivable. The airborne toxins sicken humans and infect animals on traditional farms. The gigantic cesspools of filth are the source of the airborne pollution and also threaten the water sources for hundreds of miles downstream and the aquifers that supply water to millions of people.
We also need to break up the gigantic agribusiness corporations and buy their land under eminent domain. Then we need a second homestead act. We can turn millions of acres of corporate monoculture back into family farms. We can move tens of thousands of people out of the cities and put them back on the land where they can safeguard our food supply by producing local food for local consumers.