Health and Education - where faith fits

Twitter feed

Health and Education - where faith fits

20 October 2009

Speech by Douglas Alexander, Secretary of State for International Development

Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA)

I’m delighted that, at least for this series we are casting aside that old clichéd advice – that the two subjects not to be raised in polite company are religion and politics, and that they certainly shouldn’t be brought together.
I know that this is an issue previous speakers – including Tony Blair in the first speech of this series – have touched upon. Some have referred to a ‘blind spot’ for faith in UK policy making on development.

This evening I want to suggest a different understanding of the relationship between faith and development – based on my own experience of the power of faith groups to advocate in the cause of tackling poverty; the excellence that many faith-based organisations show in delivering basic services in developing countries; and also the reach and importance that faith has across much of the developing world today.

I want to suggest to you that closer relationships between people whose primary motivation in tackling poverty is their religious faith, and people who take a secular approach to development will be vital if we are together to fulfil our shared vision of getting every child into school, and improving access to life-saving healthcare.

This seminar series is of course intended as a step towards building those better relationships. I think many of us here this evening would agree that such a series just wouldn’t have happened ten or fifteen years ago.

And in the past, Governments and political parties have sometimes given the impression that they are happy to talk to faith organisations about policy, but only on the basis that faith is somehow left behind.

I think that’s changing now for the better – and not before time. Because while there may be a prevailing assumption that the importance of faith has diminished here in the UK over the past fifty years, the last census showed that three-quarters of the population of this country describe themselves as having a faith.

And if we look across the world we see that the reach and power of faith is growing, not diminishing, and that the shape of faith is changing. In many parts of Central and South America, Protestant evangelicals are challenging the continuing dominance of the Catholic Church. In China and the former Soviet Union, religious and spiritual movements are stirring after a long hibernation. Secular Arab nationalism has been challenged of course by a resurgent Islam stretching from North Africa to South Asia. Christianity continues to grow apace across Africa and Asia.

So even the most secular politician or development expert, looking at the world today, is led to a realisation: surely, faith cannot simply be ignored.

The power of faith – advocacy, values and delivery

I have long understood the important role that people of faith have in tackling poverty. Growing up as I did in a manse where my father was a minister for 30 years, I saw first-hand the role of the Church in helping those in our community who were in need of assistance. I was brought up to look beyond the community in which I was raised – indeed, I can freely admit this evening, I was delivering Christian Aid leaflets long before I delivered leaflets for the Labour party.

If anything, the influence of the churches on international development has grown through the decades. And four years ago, on July 2nd 2005, as I pushed my daughter in her pram along the streets of Edinburgh as part of the greatest demonstration ever witnessed in that city, I had cause to reflect that the spine, the real backbone of that huge crowd was made up of people of faith.

Indeed many people underestimate just how much the Make Poverty History movement – just like the Jubilee 2000 movement before it – was made up of people of conscience and goodwill who came together not to ensure profits trickle down, but to ensure that, as the ancient scripture puts it: “Justice flows like a mighty river”.
Those movements helped to deliver the aid increases and debt cancellation that have helped today to get 40 million more children into school in the developing world. They helped to increase the number of people with access to AIDS treatment from just 100,000 at the turn of the century to over 4 million people today.

Yet the role of faith groups in creating public support for development in this country is I would suggest not limited to the great networks of campaigning and advocacy that have been created over the past decade. At a much more profound, much deeper level, the faiths provide both a repository of and a transmitter for the moral and ethical values that motivate many engaged in the work of development.

For as it is written in the Torah: “love thy neighbour as thyself”, so too the prophet Muhammed said “that which you want for yourself, seek for mankind”.

As Buddhists teach us “hurt not others in ways that you find yourself hurtful”, Sikhs aspire to “Treat others as you would be treated yourself”.

As Christians follow the code of “do unto others what you would have them do unto you”, Hindus proclaim “the sum of duty is not do unto others what would cause pain if done to you”.

That is a golden thread running through the faiths of the world, that has – I would argue - provided the moral and ethical foundations without which neither the Millennium Development Goals, nor the universal declaration on human rights would be conceivable.

Despite the tragic examples of where people claiming to act in the name of faith and religion have promoted inequality, hate and even violence, I believe that the great faiths have at their heart the equal worth of every man, woman and child. And it is to the credit of many people of faith that they dedicate their lives to addressing the imbalance between the innate equality I’ve spoken of and the terrible inequity that persists around the world today.

I know that many of you in this room are part of that fight for social justice, and represent organisations that have gained rightfully global reputations for your programmatic excellence – some of which I have had the good fortune to witness myself on my travels across the developing world.

Yet on those visits, I have also been struck by the countless small acts of charity undertaken by people of faith, far from the cameras. Earlier this year I visited Goma, in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where I saw a camp for people forced to flee the terrible violence afflicting that region.

The camp was providing much needed shelter, food and healthcare for thousands of people. Later, as I travelled in to Goma town centre, I met some of the hundreds of Congolese people who – at the instigation of local churches – had taken people into their own homes, and shared what little they had with their families.

That experience was, for me, a powerful reminder of the importance that faith has in providing – for the vast majority of people across the developing world – both a way of understanding the world, and of interacting with it. If we want to help individuals, communities and countries across the developing world to lift themselves out of poverty, then understanding and harnessing the power of faith will be vital to that task.

Perhaps nowhere is it more important that we harness that power than in the efforts to get every child into school and improve access to life-saving healthcare – the subject of our discussions this evening.

The future challenges in health and education

The faith traditions have always understood and tended to both the needs of the body – in healing the sick – and the needs of the soul, in providing the education that gives rise to the opportunity for people to realise their true human potential.

Education

Indeed there are as many as 120,000 Catholic-affiliated schools alone around the world. In Lesotho, to give just one example, as much as 90 per cent of all primary education is delivered by faith groups.

Faith based organisations – alongside the strong support we provide for public provision - have played an important role in the progress we have seen in getting more children in school – over the last seven years the number of children out of school has fallen by 28 million.

But that progress will slow, because the majority of the remaining 75 million children who are today without school live in the areas of the world that are hardest to reach. More than half of them live in countries affected by conflict.

It’s here that faith organisations can make perhaps the biggest difference –because they reach into communities where others cannot. In southern Sudan, the Episcopal Church of the Sudan, supported by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s education programme, has today 300 schools serving 80,000 children of all faiths.

My department is currently consulting on the future direction of our education strategy to ensure that the £8.5 billion we have committed to invest in education has the greatest impact on getting children into school – no matter where they live. I’d encourage any of you who haven’t done so to contribute your thoughts to that consultation.

Health

Just as faith groups are vitally important providers of schooling across the developing world, they also provide vital work in healing the sick. In Nigeria, the Christian Health Association delivers almost half of all primary health care services. Churches and faith-based groups in a number of African countries have helped to dramatically increase the use of insecticide treated bed nets for malaria – in some cases from 20 per cent to over 90 per cent.
In the time I have left to speak this evening though, I want to focus on two health care challenges where faith groups could make an even greater difference: in the fight against Aids, and in preventing the deaths of mothers in pregnancy and childbirth.

Making progress in each of these areas will not only require the delivery of more resources – though of course that matters where there are too few clinics, too few doctors and too few medicines. To make progress on HIV and maternal mortality, we also need to change attitudes that have often persisted for generations.
HIV and Aids

Let me turn first to the issue of HIV and Aids. As I’ve already said, more than four million people across the developing world are now using antiretroviral drugs – which represents tremendous progress in recent years. That treatment is often provided by faith-based organisations. The Catholic Church works in some 16,000 health centres across sub-Saharan Africa alone.

Yet for every person newly on treatment, three more people are infected with HIV. As many of you in this room know, there has been honest disagreement both with and within some faith organisations on the role of contraception in preventing the spread of that deadly virus.

So let me be clear, the UK government does not promote abstinence-only messages as a strategy for HIV prevention and pregnancy reduction for young people. None of the available evidence supports abstinence only programmes as an effective strategy for HIV prevention.

DFID promotes the full – as we call it - ABC message as a comprehensive balanced strategy for HIV prevention and pregnancy reduction for young people - A for Abstinence; B for Be Faithful; and C for Correct and Consistent Condom use.

Yet preventing the spread of this deadly virus and indeed the disease will also require tackling the stigma that persists across much of the developing world, and stops people from getting tested, seeking treatment and admitting their positive status to others.

One source of this stigma is the mistaken belief that being HIV positive is somehow a ‘punishment from God’ – so faith leaders have a particular role to play, and I would argue a responsibility to move communities from shamed silence, to dialogue, to action on HIV and Aids. That is why the Department for International Development has supported faith leaders who are HIV positive to share their HIV status publicly and tell their own stories of leading productive lives.

When Zimbabwean Pastor Maxwell Kapachawo became ill he didn’t suspect HIV at first - but three years later his health deteriorated so much that he was ordered to leave his ministry. He said then that he wanted to die quickly, before his community found out about his illness. But a fellow pastor helped Maxwell to change his mind – and convince him that God would not judge him for his HIV status.

Inspired then by a DFID supported workshop for HIV-positive religious leaders, Maxwell spoke to his congregation about his own circumstances and his own situation. Three weeks after disclosing his own status in the church, three-quarters of his congregation testified that they had gone for an HIV test. “They were happy to know their status” said Maxwell, “because they had seen life in me”.

Maternal mortality

For too many people today across the developing world, HIV remains a death sentence – when we know it is possible to live a long and productive life with access to the right care and treatment.

And for too many women across the developing world, what should be the happiest day of their lives is in fact the last day of their lives. Because every minute a woman dies from complications in pregnancy or childbirth.
What is so frustrating is that we have the technology to save women, and we have the understanding. Yet in too many places around the world it is the political will that is lacking. As Radhika Coomeraswamy, former UN special rapporteur on violence against women has said: “the biggest problem… we find is that people are using culture and religion to deny women’s rights”.

That’s been the case in Northern Nigeria, where many women need permission from husbands to attend local medical facilities. The tragic result is that many women give birth unattended, at home, and around one in ten women die either in pregnancy or childbirth.

So my Department has worked with local religious leaders to give them information as to the benefits of a hospital or assisted delivery – they in turn have passed the message on to the community, and publicised good news when lives have been saved. In under a year, the number of women attending hospital for emergency obstetric care has risen by 50 per cent.

One woman, Selatu Saji, was rushed to hospital in the late stages of labour – she needed a blood transfusion because of complications, and as she said herself: had she been at home, she wouldn’t have survived.

Thousands of women across Selatu’s home state of Jigawa will now have their lives saved – because thanks to the example set by local faith leaders, they can have access the services they so desperately need.
These stories, of Pastor Maxwell and of Selatu, show how people of faith can bind their values to determined action in the pursuit of ending extreme poverty.

Conclusion – the fierce urgency of now

Such efforts are urgently needed today. Not only because we remain too far from meeting the Millennium Development Goals. But because the twin crises of the global economic downturn and climate change threaten to turn more of the ‘nearly poor’ into the ‘newly poor’ in today’s world.

The latest estimate from the United Nations suggests that some 100 million people have been forced into poverty as a result of the economic downturn. For the first time in four decades, more than a billion people are going hungry around the world this evening. The spectre of dangerous climate change – much in our thoughts ahead of Copenhagen - already haunts many of the world’s poorest people – from the arid plains of East Africa to the shifting chars of Bangladesh.

We must, given these crises, take this moment to build a partnership for development that sees beyond whatever differences we have and builds from our strengths. We must together address the globalisation that, in Pope Benedict’s words “makes us neighbours, but does not make us brothers”.

I’ve already spoken of the way in which my view of the world was shaped by my upbringing. Part of the reason that my parents brought us up to look beyond our own immediate community was because of their own experiences travelling the world.

In 1959 – just a week after they were married – my parents moved to New York as postgraduate students. While there, they joined fellow students and travelled to North Carolina to protest against the segregation that was still inherent in the South.

I’m proud to say they picketed lunch counters which would not serve blacks and were spat upon by fellow whites for their actions. They queued up to attend the inaugural meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Council, where they heard the words of a young Baptist preacher.

The power of his words made a deep and lasting impression on my parents. And in the years that followed, they would make a deep impression on our world.

That young Baptist preacher of course was Dr Martin Luther King – whose fight for justice challenged the face of his nation. He understood that to have faith commits one to the cause of social justice. That to be a leader within faith gives one a duty to preach beyond individual morality, towards a broader engagement with the world.
He set an example to us all. And when I think of the task ahead of us it is to his words that I turn.

He said, and I quote directly, “We are faced with the fact… that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late.”
Friends, let us not look back on this moment and say we knew, but we did not act. Let us not, in the years to come, say we acted, but it was too late. Let us instead chart a new course - and embrace, together, the fierce urgency of now.