I think those remarks and the points you raise are exactly the rights ones.
I think Canada, going back to the period since the Gleneagles agreement was made to double aid to sub-Saharan Africa, actually has had a very proud record since then. There have been big expansions to the aid budget. Those expansions have made a difference.
We now have a very different environment in two critical respects. First of all, because of the impact of the financial crisis and the way it interacted with the previous food crisis, we're going to see an increase in overall poverty numbers within the developing world, probably in the order of 150,000 million or so. Secondly, we've seen big increases in the levels of child malnutrition within the developing world. So the backdrop is already worrying.
Because of the combined effects of lower growth and lower levels of revenue collection in sub-Saharan Africa in particular, the capacity of governments to finance basic services such as education has been diminished. In the report, we estimate that the effect of the financial crisis will be to cut per-student spending in primary schools in sub-Saharan African by around 13%. In other words, it would have been 13% higher without the impact of the crisis.
To freeze support in a context of rising poverty and diminishing national capacity to finance is a scenario for a bad outcome. We can't on the one hand say to the international community that we want to accelerate progress and on the other hand say that we won't provide the needed resources to achieve that goal. If we will the ends, we have to provide the means. I think the problem at the moment is that we have a gap between the ambition and the commitment that's being demonstrated.