It seems that the world is becoming a more and more dangerous, unstable and unpredictable place. This has been fairly terrible for the world economy and of course seems primarily due to the policies of Trump and his enforces. Whoever is to blame, the people that tend to suffer most in a major downturn are the poor…. worldwide.
They have no significant reserves to cope. Add to this the major de-funding of USAID (U.S. agency for international development) and ever falling foreign aid by U.S. and in fact most countries including Australia and you have an increasingly dire situation for the less fortunate on our planet.
Apparently, on average, Australians think we invest 16% of the Federal budget on overseas aid and believe that we should be spending about 12%.
Actually, Australia spends about 0.21% of our gross national income on overseas aid. That’s 21cents in every $100.
We live in a lucky country. In 2023 Health care spending per capita in Australia was about $8,000 – the vast majority provided by state and federal government. In the Democratic Republic of Congo it was around $21.
It is only a month till May. Please contemplate the above while considering your future contribution to TTD (and our developing world programmes) where we are trying to redress some of this startling imbalance of what is basically …. luck.