When people in the southwest think about poverty, their concerns often lie close to home. The cost of living crisis, increasing food bank use and housing pressures are all visible realities across the region. There is another aspect to poverty that can feel very distant from our everyday lives in the southwest: the extreme poverty experienced by millions of people around the globe. This is where The Borgen Project comes in.
The Borgen Project is an international lobbying and advocacy organisation that works to ensure global poverty alleviation is a foreign policy objective. The organisation was founded by Clint Borgen in 2003 in the United States. Clint was inspired to found The Borgen Project after working as a UN volunteer in refugee camps during the Kosovo War and genocide in 1999. He recognised that there was a need for an organisation to help ensure extreme poverty received the political attention that it desperately needs.
Today, The Borgen Project operates in many countries, including the United Kingdom. It offers opportunities for volunteers, writers, advocates and social media gurus to become involved in campaigns aimed at reducing global poverty via political engagement. I am currently volunteering as a political affairs intern with The Borgen Project in the city of Exeter. Bridging the gap between local citizens and global action is a key mission of The Borgen Project. I have been actively raising awareness about global poverty and the foreign aid budget in Exeter and now I am appealing to the rest of the southwest!
The current Labour government is reducing the official development assistance (ODA) budget to just 0.3 per cent of gross national income. This is money the UK sends overseas to fund healthcare programmes, education initiatives, humanitarian relief, food security projects and much more. Cutting this budget will significantly reduce these initiatives and in many cases will cancel them all together. International development spending is too often seen as a target for quick and easy budget cuts, this is why organisations such as The Borgen Project are needed – to fight against these decisions. The belief is simple: governments have enormous power to improve the lives of people around the globe, and ordinary citizens can influence governments more than they realise.
Unlike many charities that focus on delivering aid directly, The Borgen Project concentrates on advocacy. Volunteers engage directly with elected representatives, organise campaigns, encourage public support for effective development policies and urge local people to contact their representatives in government to support such policies. Attending community events and other networking events, to start conversations with others about global poverty, is also very effective, and the people of Exeter have been very keen to talk with me about these issues. I have also been directly corresponding with Steve Race, MP for Exeter, to ensure his support for the restoration of the ODA budget, which he has confirmed. This emphasis on advocacy is very relevant to the UK. Whilst donations remain important, political decisions still determine the scale and effectiveness of international development efforts.
For many in the southwest, global poverty may seem remote. Yet the region does have a significant international outlook. The southwest is home to globally recognised universities such as Exeter and Plymouth. These universities attract people from all over the globe, and their students engage in a variety of international issues and go on to do so in their future careers. The Plymouth and South Devon Freeport* and the Goonhilly Earth Station in Cornwall are just two projects and initiatives with significant global influence, in international trade and investment and telecommunications and space exploration, respectively.
Importantly, the challenges facing the world’s poor are also very connected to issues that affect the southwest. Climate change is a notable example. Droughts, floods, and extreme weather disproportionately affect low-income countries, pushing vulnerable populations deeper into poverty. At the same time, communities across Cornwall and Devon are experiencing the consequences of changing weather patterns through coastal erosion, flooding, and agricultural disruption.
The Borgen Project also seeks to challenge a common misconception: that progress against global poverty is impossible. In reality, global poverty has significantly decreased in recent years. In 2000, over 2.2 billion people lived in absolute poverty; today this figure is between 700 and 800 million. These achievements have not happened by accident. They are the result of sustained effort towards the cause, investment, international cooperation and political commitment.
For residents in the southwest region who are looking for meaningful ways to contribute, The Borgen Project offers an alternative to the feeling of helplessness that often accompanies global issues. Organisations such as The Borgen Project remind us that citizenship extends beyond our immediate surroundings. The decisions made in Westminster and other centres of power in the UK can have profound consequences for families thousands of miles away.
The southwest has a strong tradition of community action, volunteering and social justice. Those values need not stop at county borders or national borders. Whether through contacting your MP, volunteering time, writing articles, fundraising or starting conversations, there are opportunities to meaningfully contribute to this fantastic cause with The Borgen Project. The fight against global poverty may be international in scope, but it begins with local people deciding that the lives of others matter.
*West Country Voices does not support freeports. Editor
