Britain’s Brown to promise $1.8 bln for vaccines

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British finance minister Gordon Brown will propose on Wednesday giving $1.8 billion over the next 15 years to a campaign to get life-saving vaccines to millions of children in poor countries.

The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI) already received a $1 billion boost on Tuesday from Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates and the Norwegian government, which the donors had hoped would kick-start similar pledges.

Britain is now calling for $4 billion extra to be committed over the next 10 years through a pilot of Brown’s brainchild - the International Finance Facility (IFF) - which would frontload the aid commitments by issuing bonds against them.

Brown will tell a development seminar on Wednesday that such a move could save the lives of an additional 5 million people between now and 2015, according to Treasury officials.

Brown, who is hosting a meeting of Group of Seven finance ministers in London next week, will also say that concerted and coordinated action is needed if the world is to realise the Millennium Development Goals of halving global poverty.

The British Chancellor of the Exchequer will set out a five-point plan for the British presidency of the G7 rich nations club this year, covering debt relief, aid, trade, education and health.

London wants to help set the world back on course to meet the U.N. targets first agreed in New York in 2000.

First, Brown wants to complete the debt reduction process by matching 100 percent bilateral debt relief with financing 100 percent relief of the debt owed by the poorest countries to the World Bank, the IMF and the African Development Bank.

Next, Brown will try win support to establish his IFF, which he reckons, would double aid spending to $100 billion a year by securitising donor countries’ annual aid budgets.

On health, Brown wants not only to raise money for vaccination programmes, but also to launch a comprehensive plan to tackle HIV and AIDS, and to establish an advance purchase agreement to help get new malaria and AIDS drugs to market.

He also wants to deliver a new plan for schooling by 2015 for the 110 million children currently going without education and to set up an infrastructure to help poorer countries improve their capacity to trade. 

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