Mahatma Gandhi urged those with power to apply a simple test before they acted. "Recall the face of the poorest and weakest person you have seen," he wrote, "and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to them."
This weekend at the Group of Seven summit in Cologne, leaders of the world's most powerful countries have the chance to make a real difference to the lives of some of the poorest people on earth. By taking decisive action to end the debt crisis, they could give new hope to sub-Saharan Africa, the world's most impoverished region, and start to close the obscene gap dividing rich and poor.
Alternatively, of course, they can continue in the best G7 tradition of offering empty promises and half-measures. Current evidence suggests that this will be the outcome. As they prepare for Cologne, political leaders should reflect carefully on what is at stake. They could start by considering the human development profile of the 41 heavily indebted poor countries, known as HIPCs .
This year, over four million children in these countries will die before the age of five. Expressed differently, poverty is claiming the lives of about 11,000 children each day. Life expectancy in highly indebted countries is 26 years shorter than in the UK. And there are 50 million primary school-age children who are not in school, denied even the most basic educational opportunities. There is an even more chilling indicator of the multiple layers of deprivation: today, a child born in a highly indebted African country is more likely to suffer premature death than to attend secondary school.
Nobody claims that debt is solely responsible for these problems. It does, however, represent a formidable barrier to their resolution, since debt is diverting on a massive scale the scarce financial resources available to governments. Take the case of Tanzania. This is a country with almost two million children out of school, the education infrastructure is collapsing, and illiteracy is rising. Yet for every $1 spent on primary education, another $4 is spent on debt servicing.
In Ethiopia, over one quarter of a million children will die this year as a result of diarrhoea. A similar number will die from other easily preventable conditions. Yet Ethiopia is spending some six times as much on debt as on the primary health clinics and low-cost interventions which could save lives. The same story of grotesque misallocation could be told for almost any of the highly indebted countries.
The crushing burden of debt is making it impossible for African states to respond to formidable human development challenges. The HIV/Aids epidemic, disease, environmental degradation, and the crisis in education all demand additional public finance. However, most heavily indebted countries are now directing more than one quarter of their total revenue towards debt servicing. In effect, debt has become a system of regressive taxation on the poor.
Three years ago, it looked as though things were about to change. After decades of studied indifference, rich countries, the IMF and the World Bank, finally conceded the case for a new approach to debt. Under the Highly Indebted Poor Countries initiative, they agreed to lower debt to more sustainable levels by cancelling some of what was owed.
It proved to be a false dawn. Despite some positive elements, the HIPC initiative was deeply unrealistic. In order to qualify, countries were required to adhere for a six-year period to IMF austerity programmes, with the result that only three countries have so far seen any benefits. To make matters worse, the debt relief on offer has been painfully inadequate. When Mozambique receives HIPC debt relief later this year it will save about $12m on a debt service bill of $108m. And it will continue to spend more on debt servicing than on health and education combined.
All G7 governments now agree that the debt relief framework is not solving the problem. Unfortunately, that is just about all they agree on. The British Chancellor, Gordon Brown, has been pressing other finance ministries to provide much earlier, deeper and broader levels of debt reduction. However, France, Japan and the US have resolutely refused to pay for a more ambitious approach.
The upshot is a compromise proposal, crafted by the US, which now looks likely to be accepted, but falls far short of what is needed. Finance ministries have been applying more spin than Shane Warne on a good day to persuade the media that the $50bn in debt stock reduction on offer marks a victory for G7 resolve. In fact, the big headline figure looks less impressive at the sharp end of the debt crisis: namely, in government budgets.
If the new proposal is adopted, it will leave the HIPC countries spending more than one quarter of their revenue on debt servicing. Under the current framework, Tanzania stands to save the princely sum of $10m a year on a debt bill of $250. The improved version will increase this by the derisory sum of $6m. As in other countries, debt repayments will continue to outweigh social spending.
Bluntly stated, what is on offer is not good enough. No impoverished country should be spending more on debt servicing than it is able to spend on health and education. That is why Oxfam has proposed that a ceiling of 10 per cent be set on the proportion of government revenue allocated to debt servicing. Instead of making eligibility conditional on IMF programmes, incentives could be created for governments to transfer the resources saved into areas - such as health and education - which make a real difference to peoples' lives.
Would this cost more money? Yes it would - about $100bn in our estimation. Is it unaffordable? That depends on political will. In terms of real annual spending the additional funding required would represents just 0.03 per cent of the G7's collective GDP spread over seven years. This represents less than one quarter of the amount cut from aid budgets since 1992.
Over the next few days, G7 heads of government will be bombarded with financial data on debt, courtesy of their treasury "experts". They need to look beyond the numbers at the real human face of the debt problem - at the faces of children suffering avoidable disease, or being denied their only opportunity for education; and at the faces of parents struggling to give them a chance.
They need to look long and hard. And they need to say "enough".
Kevin Watkins is a Senior Policy Advisor with Oxfam.