Ten years ago today, almost a quarter of a million people marched in Edinburgh under the banner Make Poverty History. Around 8 million people wore the famous white wristband which came to symbolise the campaign and some 444,000 emailed Prime Minister Tony Blair. It was the largest anti-poverty movement the UK had ever seen, bringing together numerous NGOs, faith groups and organisations in the hope of ending structural injustices around the world.
The Make Poverty History campaign has been credited with putting unparalleled pressure on governments to take action, focusing on trade justice, dropping unpayable debts and offering more aid to some of the wold's poorest nations. G8 leaders meeting in Scotland responded by committing to cancel a number of debts and pledged to increase aid by $50 billion each year by 2010.
Oxfam, one of the NGOs spearheading the campaign, said it "demonstrated that ordinary people can push leaders to show ambition to address extreme poverty when they come together to demand action".
A decade on, however, and poverty is evidently still an issue across the world. Extreme poverty has declined significantly – according to the World Bank, the number of people classified as extremely poor fell from 1.25 billion to 1 billion between 2008 and 2011, and the UN says that the target of reducing extreme poverty rates by half was met five years ahead of the 2015 deadline set in 2000. However, with at least a billion people still living in extreme poverty, did the Make Poverty History campaign really make a difference?
"It achieved a lot of good things that we want to continue and carry forward," says Paul Cook, Tearfund's advocacy director. Tearfund was one of the founding members of the campaign and became a key player in mobilising people to get involved.
Cook says 2005 offered a "real alignment of opportunity" for the campaign to take off. The G8 was being held in Gleneagles, and the UK had the presidency of the EU. There was a five-year review of the Millennium Development Goals and Jubilee debt cancellation, and the World Trade Organisation was also holding talks. "The NGOs got together and thought 'How do we make the most out of this?'" he says.
Though poverty has by no means been eliminated, "we've seen real changes", Cook told Christian Today. "There was a real, lasting legacy."
He believes that having so many NGOs and other organisations working for the same goal and "pulling in the same direction" was a key part of the campaign's appeal and that having a single, big vision for people to get behind proved vital.
"In 1975 the proportion of the world living in extreme poverty was over 50 per cent, and it's now just over 20 per cent," he says. "That's incredible progress, and a lot of that has gone on as a result of the changes implemented through the Make Poverty History campaign. There has really been significant change.
"The reality is that nations are going through a development process," he added."The pure fact is that there has been a phenomenal change in poverty, and all the UN statistics back that up and demonstrate that. That should be celebrated."
Martin Drewry, previously head of campaigns at Christians Aid – another founding organisation of Make Poverty History – is now director at Health Poverty Action. He agrees that the movement sparked something powerful, but says that there's a feeling that governments were "let off too lightly".
"At Christian Aid, we always felt frustrated that we weren't being radical enough," he says. "When Jesus went into the temple he didn't start a charity fundraiser, he turned the tables...While great things happened as a result of the pressure of that year [2005], I still think we should have been focused on unjust trading, and the fundamental causes of poverty, rather than aid."
Drewry points to the failure of some of the G8 leaders to keep their promises and believes that more focus should have been placed on single issues such as trade injustice rather than 'poverty' as a whole. "It's not just about scale and volume," he explains. "It also requires commitment to looking in detail at the structural causes and the power relations that are causing such poverty.
"Make Poverty History lumped every single cause of poverty together, and so all people heard was one message – simply give money...[It] focused too heavily on the shallow masses – 'we can end poverty if you send this text to the government and give loads of money' – but it's nothing like that."
Instead, we should be championing long-term commitment to ending the systemic causes of poverty, Drewry says. "Real change isn't necessarily from those big high profile moments...they can excite and inspire people, but if it's just a big moment, any politician or decision maker knows that the moment will pass.
"You might think you're helping to end poverty by watching Live Aid, but you're not...We will end poverty by organising with people, campaigning locally, taking messages to our churches and creating sustained pressure."
The struggle to make poverty history is therefore ongoing, "but I do believe it's a struggle that one day will be won", Drewry says.
"Just as we look back at some of the horrors of our past, I do believe that one day we will look back and be outraged, horrified and astounded that there was such massive poverty...[but] the calling for people of faith is that this is a lifelong commitment, that sometimes requires real courage, passion and sacrifice, and that's absolutely ongoing."
Paul Cook agrees that there is a need to build on the legacy of Make Poverty History to keep the momentum going. "Looking at the past 10 years, the world has changed quite a bit. This was pre-Facebook and pre-Twitter, and before smartphones," he explains. "In lots of ways tactics have evolved and they need to – the internet provides a huge opportunity to reach more people through online technology and there's a challenge in how to translate that into offline activity."
'Clicktivism' – the idea that people feel that they have contributed to a campaign by 'liking' it on Facebook or similar, while failing to actually do anything beyond that – can raise awareness, "but it doesn't show the government how seriously people care about things", Cook says.
Make Poverty History was powerful because it encouraged people to actually turn up and do something, but if projections that up to a billion people could still be extremely poor in 2030 prove true, then it wasn't enough.
