Charitable Peachy: For Enduring Economic Growth, G-20 Must Not Leave Poorest Countries off the Agenda, Save the Children Says

The G-20 isn’t moving quickly enough to offer the kind of global economic leadership that ensures balanced growth and stability by improving the resilience of the world’s poor, Save the Children said Sunday.

“The G-20 is taking the reins of the global economic agenda from the G-8, but they have yet to show they’ll lead on reducing the extreme poverty robbing hundreds of millions of children—and their communities—of any real opportunities for success,” said Michael Klosson, Save the Children’s Vice President for Policy and Humanitarian Response. “If the extremes of wealth and poverty persist, the growth sought by the G-20 will be neither strong, nor sustainable nor balanced.”

“The G-20 has offered some encouraging language on narrowing the development gap, and reaffirmed the importance of food security, but it took no major, new action at this summit beyond establishing a working group.  We hope this noteworthy step forward will indeed produce a strong agenda and decisive action plans at the upcoming November G-20 summit in Seoul,” Klosson said.

“It would be the height of irony if including emerging countries in global economic leadership comes to mean the world’s poorest people are effectively left off the international agenda.”

At the Toronto summit Sunday, the G-20 declaration did commit the G-20 to “narrowing the development gap.”  But the G-20 missed a perfect opportunity for decisive action when they did not endorse or boost the G-8’s maternal and child health initiative announced the day before. 

The G-8 proposed investment of $5 billion over five years fell short of what is needed to dramatically reduce the 9 million child deaths and 350,000 maternal deaths each year.  But the initiative marked a step in the right direction and an important recognition that the world must unite to stop a tide of preventable disability and death plaguing communities in much of the developing world. 

Global progress depends on G-20 leaders moving to improve maternal and child health both within their own societies and providing global support for the Millennium Development Goals on child survival and maternal health.  Of the eight goals, those two have seen the least progress toward 2015 targets, and all nations – with the G8 and G20 in the lead – must commit to game-changing action at a special U.N. summit in September, Save the Children said.

“Last year, the G-20 did the right thing by joining the G-8 in addressing global food security.  This year they missed a tremendous opportunity to fight child and maternal deaths.  Increasing global access to very basic health care is not only the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do,” Klosson said.  “One need only look at how attention to child and maternal health and the smaller family sizes that followed helped fuel east Asia’s dramatic economic growth in recent decades.”

Save the Children welcomed the G-20’s declaration that the group would hold itself accountable for any future commitments made.  But the G-20 must now put in place a transparent and rigorous system needed to annually assess those commitments.  The G-20 should move with urgency and not follow the example of the G-8, which took over 30 years to institute a robust accountability mechanism.

Everybody can see how a focus on maternal and child health saves lives and to learn how to support the cause at www.GoodGoes.org.

Save the Children is the leading, independent organization that creates lasting change for children in need in the United States and around the world. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.