Since the inception of the campaign, pressure from Make Poverty History has greatly influenced G8 leaders to approve agreements that cancelled $40 billion US owed by 18 highly indebted poor countries. Debt relief has been extremely effective in alleviating poverty in those countries as illustrated in the two case studies below.
Free Primary Education in Tanzania
In Tanzania, debt relief has enabled the country to use the money for free primary education, achieving the following:
- A 50 per cent increase in primary school population between 2000 and 2004, resulting in an additional 2.7 million children now enrolled in school
- Over the past three years, construction of 31,825 classrooms, 7,530 teachers' houses and 2,035 new schools
- In the past three years, a 106.3 per cent increase in the number of teachers with an additional 62,643 teachers recruited or retrained
- Tremendous improvement in the pass rate in the primary school final examination—from 19.3 per cent in 1999 to 48.6 per cent in 2004
Tanzania plans to use the new resources from debt cancellation towards ensuring that all children have ready access to free, quality basic education.
Child Immunization Program in Mozambique
In Mozambique, one in four children dies before age five due to infectious disease. Yet the government spends four times as much money servicing its debt—that is, making payments on interest and principal—than it does on health care.
With increased money coming from debt relief, Mozambique's immunization campaign is no longer limited to those children under five and those living in provincial and district capitals as it was before. Now, the target of the campaign has expanded to cover all children under 15 years of age.
Improved resources translate into better statistics on immunization: Coverage for measles immunization among one-year-olds increased from 58 per cent to 77 per cent between 1997 and 2003, while that for polio rose from 55 per cent to 70 per cent in the same six-year period.
So far, more than nine million children have been vaccinated in Mozambique.
