‘Off Track’ Pt II: The Norms of Human Behavior

Jun 6th, 2007 5:00 PM UTC
By Josh Chernila, ONE Online Communities Coordinator

On the eve of this year’s G8 summit, Bono and Bob Geldof, who are founders and long-term sponsors of both the ONE Campaign and DATA, have had very strong words for those nations failing in their promises to the world’s poor. Bob Geldof:

“If I sign a contract in my business life and don’t fulfil it, I would be sued. I could go to jail. Do these leaders live outside the norms of human behaviour?” the world-known activist Bob Geldof told the UK’s Daily Telegraph. “There is a great crisis of credibility,” he added.

And Bono specifically takes the Italian Government to task for actually reducing their allotment of African aid in recent years:

“Prodi is intelligent, he has a generous heart, but it seems he will arrive at the G8 with his pockets empty,” the singer told La Repubblica. In terms of aid, and in particular for Africa, he does little or nothing. “I ask myself why Italy makes so many promises to the African continent without keeping them? It’s a serial laggard,” he said. The country is at the bottom of the OECD table for development aid, giving 0.20 percent of GDP in 2006 (and not the 0.33 percent agreed upon at Gleaneagles), as well as having failed to pay its dues to the global fund for the war against pandemics, Bono pointed out.

[…]

It’s one thing to break a promise to your own citizens, and another to do it to the poorest people in the world. That’s unacceptable. Because we’re talking about hospitals without electricity and water, about nurses who send children home without vaccinations, about young girls driven into the sex trade because they don’t have a school to go to. Behind the statistics there’s a human drama. I’ve seen the expressions of these people: they stare at you, blankly.”

So what does it mean to be “off track”? Beyond the numbers, it means people suffering from extreme poverty, dying every year from preventable untreated disease, and being “off track” means children going without access to education or clean water. Being “off track” means missing the opportunity to bring light back into blank eyes. Recent developments like President Bush’s announcement that he will increase PEPFAR funding from $15 billion to $30 billion over the next five years are a promising sign, but 15,000 people die each day of HIV/AIDS, TB, and Malaria, and more needs to be done…

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