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$1 BILLION A WEEK FOR GLOBAL WELL-BEING

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Former President Bill Clinton was one of the keynote speakers at our March 28-31, 2006, Art and Science of Health Promotion Conference. I remember being spellbound during his entire speech, but I must admit I cannot reconstruct his then cogent argument that connected a host of global issues to the childhood obesity epidemic in the United States. One comment that stuck with me was the impact of post-tsunami relief efforts on the image of the United States in the eyes of Indonesian people, many of whom are Muslims. The American people contributed $1 billion to these efforts, and the U.S. military used its helicopters and naval vessels to rescue thousands of people stranded by rising water. The percentage of Indonesian people who rated the United States as favorable jumped from 26% before the tsunami to 58% after the tsunami. The favorable rating for Osama bin Laden dropped from 56% to 28% in the same period. Recently, I heard an NBC news report stating that University of Chicago economist Steven Davis estimated the Iraq war would cost the United States $410 billion to $630 billion in 2003 dollars and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz projected a final cost of $1-2 trillion.1

As a nation, we are apparently willing to spend upwards of $410 billion on global peace. Given the lessons we learned from spending $1 billion on tsunami relief, it might be instructive to speculate on how we might spend that much money on global well-being and to decide which strategy gets us closer to global peace. Here are some thoughts on how we might spend $1 billion a week:  

Week 1: $1 million grants to address each of the 1000 most compelling life- threatening emergencies occurring around the world.
Week 2: $1 million grants each to the 1000 peace organizations with the most promising strategies.
Week 3: $50 million grants to create endowments to develop long term solutions to intractable problems in each of the 20 poorest nations of the world.
Week 4: $1 billion to provide sustainable access to safe drinking water for 40,000,000 people, the first of 25 grants to come in future weeks. These grants would provide sustainable systems to provide safe water forever to one billion people and would eliminate 80% of the diseases in the world. 2
Week 5: $1 billion to feed 53,000,000 of the most malnourished people in the world for a year, one of 50 grants to come in future weeks to feed all the most malnourish people in the world for a decade.3
Week 6: $1 billion to quadruple the annual budget of the Peace Corps and increase the number of American volunteers helping people in 138 countries around the world to more than 31,000. This would be one of 10 grants to sustain this budget for a decade.4
Week 7: $1 billion to octuple the annual U.S. congressional allocation to the Fulbright Scholars Program, which supports scholarly exchange programs in 129 countries and to increase the number of scholars to 12,000. This would be the first of 10 grants to sustain this budget for a decade.5
Week 8: $1 billion to provide primary education for a year for 7% of all the primary school-age children in the world who are not in school. This is the first of 15 grants to come in future weeks to provide primary education for a year for 100% of all the primary school-age children in the world who are not in school.6

By the ninth week, I suspect the world would have changed forever. I think we would see weekly celebrations of a magnitude never before seen. I believe that people from all nations would pressure their leaders to open dialogue on lasting peace, and we would have allocated spending for only 113 of the 410 weeks.

References

  1. Wolk, M. Cost of Iraq war could surpass $1 trillion. MSNBC.com. March 17, 2006. Available at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11880954/print/1/displaymode/1098/.
    Accessed May 11, 2006.

  2. O’Donnell, MP. Access to safe drinking water: more important than health promotion. Am J Health Promot. 2006; 20:iv

  3. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. 1999 priorities for action in food, agriculture and rural development. Available at http://www.fao.org

  4. Peace Corps Web site. About the Peace Corps. Available at http://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=learn.whatispc.fastfacts.
    Accessed May 11, 2006.

  5. Fulbright Scholar Program. 2003 Annual Report. Available at: http://www.cies.org/Areports.htm. Accessed May 11, 2006.

  6. Petrova, D. The costs of attaining the Millennium Development Goals. 2004 World Bank paper. Available at: http://topics.developmentgateway.org/aideffectiveness/rc/ItemDetail.do~402274?itemId=402274. Accessed May 11, 2006.

Michael P. O'Donnell, PhD, MBA, MPH
Editor in Chief, American Journal of Health Promotion

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