Last modified on Thu 3 Jun 2021 15.00 EDT
The government claimed Britain would be a âforce for goodâ in the world when it defended merging the Department for International Development and the Foreign Office last year, but it soon announced £4bn in cuts to aid.
Charities instead warned that the worldâs most vulnerable people would be hit by the âdeadly forceâ of Britainâs new policies.
The cuts have been so deep that Tory MPs, led by the former international development secretary Andrew Mitchell, are trying to defeat them by compelling the government to abide by promises to spend 0.7% of gross national income on aid, rather than the 0.5% proposed in November.
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Global efforts to curb the spread of Covid-19 have pushed the fight against malaria to the back burner.
This shift of focus is so dire that the World Health Organization (WHO) now warns that “by the end of 2020, more people will have died of malaria than Covid-19”.
The United Nations health agency is worried that it might fail to attain the goals set in the fight against malaria. There are fears that death rates will rise sharply as the year draws to a close due to continued rechannelling of resources to the pandemic response programmes.
WHO said in a report that there should be 90 per cent fewer cases of infections and deaths by 2030, compared to 2015. More than 35 countries should by that time be completely malaria-free.
Africa: Malaria Bites Harder Under the Cover of Covid-19 allafrica.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from allafrica.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.