TV News London’s Broadcast PR expert Malcolm Douglas, working for the IF Campaign and Save the Children, travelled to Sierra Leone with ITV Daybreak presenter, Ranvir Singh, to film in the slums of Freetown and in rural villages four hours drive from the capital.
Ranvir’s reports from Sierra Leone aired on Daybreak on the first and second days of the G8 Summit in Northern Ireland. The programme described Sierra Leone as ‘The worst place in the world to be a mum’ where one in five children die before their fifth birthday and life expectancy is just 47 years.
More than half the country’s population live on less than 65 pence a day and Ranvir’s reports included interviews with mothers and children who have to work on rubbish dumps to make any living.
“There are things being done to help people, but the progress is slow,“ Malcolm adds. “Diarrhoea is one of the country’s biggest killers. Half the population doesn’t have access to clean water and Save the Children is working to provide more water pumps and water purification tablets.”
The IF campaign, which is a coalition of more than 200 charities, including Save the Children, argues that the world has enough food to feed everyone, yet 1 in 8 people do not have enough to eat and this year, world leaders must tackle hunger and save millions of lives.
The IF campaign message is: the G8 can take three big steps towards ending hunger IF they:
- Clamp down on tax havens and launch a convention on tax transparency to stop the flow of billions of pounds out of developing countries – money that could be used to end hunger.
- Help poor countries make sure that everyone, especially children, have enough nutritious food to eat and support poor families to grow their own food.
- Give people in developing countries more control over their land by protecting poor farmers from land grabs and using land to grow food not fuel.
Watch the story on ITV Daybreak:
