Advocacy International attended President Chirac’s high-level conference on Innovative Financing for development in Paris.
Advocacy International attended President Chirac’s high-level conference on Innovative Financing for development in Paris, as advisers to the Global AIDS Alliance. The conference was attended by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, President Denis Sassou-Nguesso of the Republic of the Congo, President Amadou Toumani Toure of Mali and Mr Abdou Diouf, Secretary-General of the International Organisation of the Francophonie; Ms Graca Machel of South Africa, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown MP, the German Development Minister, Ms Heidi Wiczorek-Zeul, and many other distinguished ministers from India, Brazil, Nigeria, Madagascar, Mali and Burundi - to name but a few.
At the opening session at the Elysée Palace, President Chirac said that it was now recognised that, despite earlier high expectations, globalisation had not helped many low-income countries out of poverty. On the contrary, globalisation had widened inequalities as new wealth bypassed those countries consigned to the fringes of international economic activity. It was, therefore, time to urgently divert larger-scale, predictable resources from those wealthy countries which have benefited to poorer countries which still suffer extreme poverty and deprivation.
Thanks in part to tireless advocacy work by the Global AIDS Alliance, the French and British governments set aside rivalries and announced on the 28th February that they would set up a Working Party to consider combining their two initiatives - the International Finance Facility (IFF) and the Airline Solidarity Tax (AST). View the communique on innovative financing mechanisms. The flow of resources from these initiatives would be earmarked for health and education programmes such as those administered through the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and the Education For All Fast-Track Initiative. (read more about the Guardian's Larry Elliot article on French / British agreement). Read more about the IFF, and the AST. Link to the Global AIDS Alliance report “Call for a Grand Anglo-French Alliance to End the AIDS Holocaust”.
Another prominent proposal was for a tax on foreign exchange trades – a so-called Currency Transaction Tax (CTT). In what was a wide-ranging conference, other ideas were piloted, including a global lottery, a tax on sales of weaponry and measures to reduce tax evasion. Read more about the CTT.
