A shared goal: the fight against poverty

Brazilian health minister Alexandre Padilha announced plans on Monday to produce a combined measles and rubella vaccine for developing countries, mainly in Africa. Brazil is following other leading emerging nations such as China and India in investing in biomedical technology to supply vaccines and medicines to developing countries at lower costs than those produced by pharmaceutical industries in developed nations.

This is excellent news and fits in well with DFID’s work in Brazil since 2009 which is about working with Brazil to support the poverty reduction in low income countries (LICs), mainly in Africa,  building very much on Brazil’s strong domestic track record in areas such as agriculture, food security and forest management.

This work is focused in 3 main areas:

• Joint UK-Brazil engagement in high-level dialogues on global development issues. The UK and Brazil co-hosted a Hunger Summit in London in Aug/2012 at the end of the London Olympics, agreeing to cooperate as global advocates on food and nutrition security until the Rio Olympics in 2016.
• Researching and analysing Brazil’s role and impact in global development.
• Trilateral/multilateral cooperation arrangements in a range of thematic areas, in partnership with Brazilian government agencies and institutions.

A practical example of this is DFID’s support to the World Food Programme’s Centre of Excellence on Hunger in Brasilia.  The Centre helps the Brazilian Government showcase its successful interventions in food security to other developing countries.  The demand from developing countries for sharing these lessons is high. The Centre helps provide the capacity and expertise which enables the Brazilian government to meet these without affecting its own work. The World Food Programme (WFP) also provides the infrastructure to prepare for and follow up missions through WFP offices in the countries from where the missions originate.

My colleague Darren Evans, DFID’s Food Security Adviser, recently joined a government mission from Zambia looking at Brazil’s national School Feeding Programme. The mission met with ministries, practitioners and beneficiaries and included a field visit to Bahia. It concluded with a plan of action for Zambia’s programme. This included the mechanisms for purchasing of food from local small holder farmers to aid local development and the development of nutritional menus for school feeding.  During the visit the mission spent three days in Salvador (Bahia).