Give all you can — but make it small
16 December 2006
It’s not so much the number of small charities out there — huge though that is — but the thing that unites them. They have clocked the essential fact of Africa, something that should be dinned into the brain of every politician who ever dares make a speech on the subject: it’s education, stupid. Send every child to school, create an educated middle class and the rest follows.
It’s naive, I’m sure, balancing the ambition of a politician’s Big Speech against the actions of a bunch of do-gooders operating on a tiny scale. But it’s five years since that Blair speech in Brighton, since when we have had the slaughter of Darfur; the continued descent of Zimbabwe into its own peculiar hell; the corruption of Kenya. We have also had the godly Geldof staging another spectacular, and the promises of Gleneagles which, once the sceptical number crunchers had got to work on them, did not seem to offer quite so much.
And in those five years the Mango Tree has sent 30,000 kids to school. Think small.
The fee for this article is being paid to The Kitchen Table Charities Trust, 14 Castle Street, Liverpool L2 0NJ (www.kitchentablecharities.org).
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