Speeches
Progress on Poverty
Address by Peter Adams, Executive Director of NZAID to Rotary International
Wellington , 16 July 2008
Rotary International President, Dong Kurn Lee and Young Ja Chung; His Excellency Ambassador Lee; Rotary Director General Tony Fryer , and Sharon Fryer ; and President of the Port Nicholson Rotary Club Bill Day; distinguished guests; Rotarians and friends. It is my privilege to present the following address on behalf of the Rt. Hon. Winston Peters, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
In 2005, Nelson Mandela said, ‘overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life.'
These words make it clear why New Zealand 's aid and development efforts are focussed on the elimination of poverty.
There is a deep injustice inherent in the fact that 1 billion people live on less than $1 a day, and it should be unacceptable to us that 640 million of these live in the Asia Pacific region, of which New Zealand is a member country.
Another startling measure of inequality is that the world's richest 400 individuals have as much wealth as the world's billion poorest people.
Poverty results in the waste of human potential. It magnifies the terrible impact of disaster and disease; it sparks violence and conflict; it places pressure on fragile natural resources, and each year 10 million children are dying due to the effects of poverty.
In 2000 the international community acknowledged the toll that poverty was taking on our global community and committed to the ambitious targets laid out in the Millennium Development Goals.
The goals set specific targets on halving poverty, on education, gender equality, child mortality, maternal health, disease and environmental sustainability – all to be achieved by 2015.
While the fact that one hundred and eighty nine governments agreed on the MDGs as a way forward was an unprecedented step, eight years on progress towards achieving the goals is mixed.
At a global level, 34 countries are on track to meet the infant mortality goal; 44 look likely to meet the poverty goal; 47 can meet the education goal. While this represents positive progress, the dark side of the statistics demonstrates just how great the challenge is.
Seventy-two million children of primary school age are still not in school; only a third of countries are on track to halve the number of people who have no safe drinking water, and more than half a million women still die annually from treatable and preventable complications of pregnancy and childbirth.
What is most worrying from our perspective is that our home region the Pacific, stands next to Sub-Saharan Africa as least likely to achieve the MDG targets.
The effects of poverty can be seen in the squatter settlements in Fiji ; the terrible health statistics in Papua New Guinea ; the conflicts and unrest that pepper the region; and the numbers of people who leave their land and families every year to seek a better life elsewhere.
These are the reasons that NZAID focuses most of its efforts on the Pacific. Our own neighbourhood is where we can make the greatest impact and is where we have the most to give.
New Zealand 's Pacific Development Strategy 2007-2015 was launched recently, providing up-to-date guidance for our aid and development efforts in the region.
The strategy acknowledges New Zealand 's place as a nation of the Pacific, and a corresponding commitment to helping our neighbours enjoy a more prosperous future. We live in a shared economic, social and cultural space.
The strategy outlines the shape of New Zealand 's assistance by prioritising work to improving health and education; address infrastructure gaps and promote economic growth, and improve governance and leadership
New Zealand 's development work is guided by what are known as aid effectiveness principles. This means we align ourselves with the priorities of partner governments, we coordinate with other donors, we seek to do fewer, larger and longer-term programmes. And we focus on results.
The focus on aid effectiveness is absolutely essential in a period when the number of aid activities around the globe has increased dramatically. There are thousands of organisations, from governments, international bodies, specific funds, philanthropic foundations, international and national NGOs, all providing aid.
The impact on developing countries can be massive: some receive at least one mission a day for every day of the year; in Tanzania there are over 600 projects worth less than $1m each in the health sector alone - imagine the risk of duplication, incoherence and sheer, overwhelming bureaucracy.
NZAID, Rotary, all aid-giving organisations will need to consider seriously how to lessen the transaction impact on our developing country partners of many small-scale aid projects and find ways to link them to larger, sustainable, development outcomes.
An example of what aid effectiveness means for New Zealand is in our single biggest bilateral programme in Solomon Islands , where we have made a 10-year multi-million commitment to help the Solomon Islands Ministry of Education get basic education back on its feet.
We provide support into the budget, we are the lead donor, and we work with other donors to forge a coordinated approach that funds projects across the whole education sector – classrooms, trained teachers, a national curriculum, classroom resources, and so on.
Already we are seeing results through significant improvements in attendance at schools, a greater availability of trained teachers, and more teaching materials in classrooms.
Rotary, through its membership structure and the strengths of its relationships, plays an important role in the international effort to meet the Millennium Development Goals.
Rotary takes a practical, grassroots approach to addressing these needs.
The tuberculosis isolation ward at Port Vila Central Hospital in Vanuatu is one example close to home. This project has involved a large number of Rotarians from New Zealand and Vanuatu , and a contribution of $67,000 from NZAID, and has brought obvious gains.
Recently staff from NZAID visited a Rotary International-supported project in Arusha , Tanzania which has helped build a market space recently opened by the President of Tanzania. Prior to the setting up of a market space women and their children were selling produce beside the road and lives were lost due to their proximity to heavy traffic.
Rotary and a representative group of women worked with Government to identify a piece of land for the market and set about creating a successful facility including water and sanitation facilitates.
The market now attracts buyers from restaurants and lodges, something that did not happen when the women were forced to sell at the roadside. The project is seen by the Government as a model to be used in other communities.
NZAID funding has supported numerous Rotary projects over the years, including tsunami recovery work, polio eradication, and grassroots projects in Africa and the Pacific.
Rotary has received more than $2.2 million from the New Zealand government over the past four years, including a special centenary grant of half a million, and NZAID has given $2 million directly to the United Nations to support the combined Rotary, World Health Organisation and UNICEF polio campaign.
Rotary International, as a major aid actor, and Rotary in New Zealand, will be well aware of the need to use donated funding, whether from the Government or the public, as effectively as possible for sustainable outcomes.
In that respect Rotary NZ's membership of the NZAID-funded but independently-governed KOHA scheme provides an excellent opportunity for learning, and transferring, lessons about effective development derived from experience.
In welcoming you here this evening President Lee, I can assure you that NZAID looks forward to continuing our longstanding and valuable partnership with Rotary as we both, in our different ways seek to achieve sustainable improvements in the lives of poor people and build a safer and fairer world.
Thank you
Page Last Reviewed: 18 July, 2008