Weekly Action - 26 July 2024 - G20 Development Ministers Meeting

G20 development ministers meeting

This week, the International Development Ministers for the G20 nations met in Rio de Janeiro for their annual Ministerial Meeting in the run up to the G20 heads of state meeting in November. The theme for their meeting this year was Building a Just World and a Sustainable Planet. High on the agenda for their meeting was approving the findings of the Hunger and Poverty Task Force, a working group set up by last year’s G20 meeting, which will establish the new Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty later this year.

In our current world of multiple global geo-political crises (Ukraine; Gaza; the US election; and a strengthening alliance of autocratic nations like Russia, China, Iran and North Korea) the urgently needed global focus on tackling and ending extreme poverty has not received the energy and attention it truly deserves in the last couple of years. For many decades the numbers of people living in extreme poverty and suffering from malnutrition was declining. However, in the last few years the recovery from the health and economic shock of Covid has been hugely unequal, and has set many low-income countries back significantly. The proportion of people without sufficient food and suffering from malnutrition around the world actually increased by 122 million between 2019 and 2022 (the latest year for which figures are available).

And of course these are not just abstract numbers, every one is a real person, people like baby Nur, whose tragic story is reported by UNICEF. Baby Nur was born in the massive refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, where almost a million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar now reside. He was just 5 months old when his mother passed away and left him in the care of his grandparents Subura and Syed. A month later a local health worker identified him as undernourished. “His [condition] was deteriorating rapidly. He had respiratory issues and cried often,” said Subura. “We thought he would not survive.” He weighted only 4 kilograms when his grandparents took him to a local health facility. Nur received targeted nutritional support for several months after the visit and is now much healthier and happier. ^[1] But millions more continue to suffer.

Reducing poverty around the world

As Christians, we know that God has a special care for those suffering in extreme poverty, and wants to see all cared for and their poverty ended. For, as the Book of Deuteronomy says, God “defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing. And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt” (Deut 10: 18 – 19). Arise’s 4 Shifts Report and Campaign looks at the lessons from the Bible, and at what has worked in the past, to successfully lift nations out of poverty. It finds that 2 essential shifts are needed. 1) Nations need to develop strong and fair national economies to create jobs and wealth. 2) They can then tax these to provide social spending and basic services like healthcare, education and social protection (pensions, unemployment benefits, incapacity support etc.) to ensure all benefit, not just the richest in society. All nations that have developed successfully have followed this route, and the international community should do all it can to support other nations to take the same approach.

This week, will you take action as part of Arise’s 4 Shifts Campaign, and urge the UK government to step up its efforts to help low-income nations develop the good jobs and universal access to basic services that can massively reduce extreme poverty?

Take Action

Speak out in advocacy

Contact Anneliese Dodds, the UK’s new Minister for International Development, in your own words. Congratulate her on her appointment and ask her to immediately scale up UK overseas aid back to 0.7% of Gross National Income (the target level set by the UN) and focus this on:

Supporting developing nations to lift themselves permanently out of poverty by developing a proactive national industrial and economic development strategy to create a diverse national economy that progressively moves up the value chain from agriculture to manufacturing to services to the knowledge economy.
Supporting developing nations to develop effective tax systems to collect tax at an amount equivalent to at least 45% of the national economy (one third from income taxes, one third from wealth taxes and one third from other taxes), and to spend at least two thirds of this on healthcare, education and social protection (pensions, benefits etc.).

Her contact details are:

The Rt Hon Anneliese Dodds MP
Minister of State
FCDO
King Charles Street
London
SW1A 2AH
anneliese.dodds.mp@parliament.uk

Pray

Pray for all those living in extreme poverty. Pray their nations will develop, creating booming green economies, jobs, good wages, and key public services like education and healthcare to lift them permanently out of poverty. Pray the UK will immediately scale up overseas aid back to 0.7% of GNI and focus this entirely on reducing poverty.

Give

Give to Christian organisations like Cafod, Christian Aid, Tearfund or World Vision who do crucial work supporting the most marginalised and reducing poverty in countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Practical Action

Help spread the message further by following Arise on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

Ethical Consumption

Support developing nation economies by buying products and services with the Fairtrade mark, where a much higher proportion of your money goes to producers in the developing world.

Encourage us and others by letting us know what actions you have taken – message us at info@ariseuk.org, or via Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.

Find out more

It’s great to take this action as individual Christians, but even better to come together with others to pray, discuss, worship, learn, have fun and take action together. Contact Arise if you are interested in joining or starting a local Arise group in your church or area. If you are already in an Arise group, take this action to your wider church, and get them all to do it too.

Find out more about why the world needs 4 Shifts to transition to a green and fair global economy in Arise’s 4 Shifts Report, and how this forms part of God’s bigger vision for our world in the Arise Manifesto.

Found this action online, or sent it by a friend? Sign up to receive weekly actions from Arise directly.

[1] Malnutrition: Baby Nur’s story, UNICEF, (4 Dec 2023), https://www.unicef.org/bangladesh/en/stories/malnutrition-baby-nurs-story