BRITAIN: British chancellor Gordon Brown and his European partners predict their new multibillion-pound international finance scheme will save the lives of 10 million children in developing countries over the next two decades.
Having failed to win US backing for the scheme at the G8 summit in July, Mr Brown said yesterday's launch of the International Finance Facility for Immunisation (IFFIm) had been made possible by long-term commitments by other donor countries, including France, Italy, Spain and Sweden.
The Brown-led initiative is part of a global commitment - the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) - to reduce the number of child deaths by two-thirds by 2015. The UK has pledged to raise £70 million (€104 million) each year - a third of the total - for a £2.2 billion vaccination assault on killer diseases such as measles, polio, hepatitis B, tetanus and diptheria over the next 10 years.
An estimated 30 million children go unimmunised every year and illnesses from immunisable diseases make up more than half of all illnesses in the world's poorest countries, at nine times the level in the richest.
Mr Brown said it was unacceptable that millions should die unnecessarily from preventable diseases and insisted developments in science and medicine "must be matched by an innovative financial mechanism".
Predicting that "10 million lives will be saved in the next two decades", Mr Brown said the IFFIm was such a mechanism, allowing funds to be raised by effectively borrowing money from the future to be used now.
Mr Brown said the recent disasters of the tsunami and Hurricane Katrina had shown how the world could work together: "The world has come together to react to tragedy once it has seen it suffered. Today we can see the world coming together to see tragedy averted."
France has pledged the equivalent of £54 million a year; Italy £16 million a year; Spain £6.5 million and Sweden £15 million.
Microsoft magnate Bill Gates has also promised a further £408 million over 10 years through the Gates foundation.
The scheme uses long-term financial commitments to provide "frontloaded" resources for the Global Alliance for Vaccine and Immunisation, allowing it to raise funds now against guaranteed future funding.
However, Peter Hardstaff of the Third World Development Movement said he wanted to see increased funds for immunisation but did not approve of the details of the scheme. "Our concern is that because IFFIm is a way of borrowing money from international financial markets, in years to come we're going to end up using aid money to pay off the interest to financiers rather than helping the poor."