So a charity called "Save the Children" wrote a letter to David Cameron and some athletes signed it? Of course they signed it. They'd look pretty shitty if they were asked to sign a letter asking to make child hunger or 3rd world famine a priority at the next G8 summit and they said no. I doubt much will come of it.
I've been watching the same "Dollar a day will feed a child" commercials on television since I was a child. The images are sickening. Entire villages of people with swelled stomachs and bones sticking almost through the skin. Flies crawling on their faces. Apparently this has been going on for generations. How are people with flies on their faces and bones sticking through their skin having children in the first place? I don't think the villages reached this level of starvation after they had these children. I wouldn't even want to attempt reproduction with a starving woman with flies on her face. But that's just me.
Without children, there is noone to care for the elderly parents, nor work the land for future generations. Unlike the rich nations, the state will not help, and you cannot employ anyone to do it for you. High child mortality has lead to a culture of having as many children as you possibly can, knowing that most will die young. It is when this changes, and culture does not, that you can get a sudden surge in population which runs out of support resources. The unequal disribution of wealth concentrates the negative consequences in a few places that suffer such total devastation, even though if shared evenly, the pain would barely be noticed by anyone.
In order to get a more equal distribution, the rich are guaranteed to be on the losing end, yet they are the ones making the decisions. Of course nothing is going to come of it, it's bleedin' obvious.
The only hope is to cut out the rich decision makers altogether, and set up direct aid schemes on small scales, and loads of them. Even this runs into problems because the local elites tend to intercept and pocket any aid before it reaches the end users.
Rather than expect government officials to decide to make themselves poorer when they retire from office, trick them into setting up schemes such as tax relief that appear to make them LESS liable, and let them find out they have been "had" long after they retire because so many people have taken up the offer.
It seems the current government have just come to this realisation, and propose to scale back the tax breaks for charitable donations on the rather dubious grounds that they are all "tax dodges for the wealthy". Maybe there IS a way to use them in this way, but voting them out of existence seems like turkeys voting for Christmas, it makes little sense. More likely is that so many people have started giving donations under gift aid that the government has seen a significant fall in tax revenues because of the bulk relief claims coming in from charities under the scheme.
Don't bitch and moan that the government will never do anything, do what I did and sponsor a child by direct donation to one of these schemes. Do what Purple Lounge clearly didn't do, and cost the total expected outlay until your child reaches 18 (a shade over 2K in my case, and absolute fortune for them), and place it somewhere segregated from your gambling accounts so that if you get screwed, your child's community doesn't.
The schemes are normally structured so that the amount needed to support a project are worked out, and then enough children are selected in order to secure the income. These children are sponsored by people in the richer countries, who will barely notice the money going out, pooled together, and used in the target community. In this structure, you sponsor the community with a group of others, with the child and family being the point of contact that builds the relationship, allowing you to see how things change over time.
There are schemes where you directly sponsor a single child, however there is a view that this can lead to tensions and jealousy within a community, with a lucky child having a "rich" foreign sponsor being given chances that the rest can only dream of, and flaunted right under their noses. Such schemes therefore need to be planned very carefully indeed.
Water Aid (My mum pays into this) targets the provision of clean water and sanitation to communities, with this thought to enable them to escape poverty and disease to make progress. This is possibly down to them not having to spend most of the day finding the nearest source of the least disease ridden drinking water, and this time can then be spent tending to crops, and sending their children to school to learn how to do things better and stimulate progress.
Other schemes target the provision of free to use schools and hospitals, giving the poor access to education and healthcare which they would otherwise not be able to afford.
The governments on the other hand, just produce large volumes of hot air, which rises and helps nobody.
If one is to take the approach of writing a letter, end it with ".....else I will be voting for the <insert name of opposition party here> at the next election".
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