Will the G-20 do anything about poverty?

If you want to influence what happens at a summit like the G-20, where the final communiqué is drafted in advance and most of the agenda items are probably already decided upon at this point, you need to start your advocacy campaign early.

But that isn’t deterring groups here from weighing in on what the leaders of the world’s most powerful countries ought to be doing this week. Even though it’s a rather technocratic gathering driven by the priorities of finance ministries, the G-20 makes for a great bully pulpit, whether your cause is poverty or climate change, women’s rights or financial-sector transparency.

Oxfam International and Save the Children, two of the world’s largest and most influential NGOs working on global poverty, are separately urging the G-20 to do more to protect the world’s most vulnerable populations from the continued fallout of the global economic crisis.

Their worry, group representatives here say, is that as developed countries begin to recover, the plight of the world’s poor will fall by the wayside. That could be very bad news indeed, because according to Oxfam, 100 people around the world are currently being driven to poverty each minute. The group is projecting that the budgets of governments in sub-Saharan Africa will be $70 billion smaller this year, leaving them struggling to meet rising needs.

"In the time it takes G-20 leaders to tuck into dinner tonight," said Oxfam senior policy advisor Max Lawson in a statement, "thousands more people will be pushed into poverty and forced to survive on less than $1.25 a day."

Lawson also complained that G-20 countries have yet to deliver on the $50 billion in short-term emergency relief they promised at the London summit in April.

Michael Klosson of Save the Children, which operates in more than 50 countries, said that "from what we see on the ground … it’s still a real problem." Klosson, a former U.S. ambassador to Cyprus who now heads the organization’s policy efforts, pointed to the drying up of remittances to and foreign direct investment in places like sub-Saharan Africa as global economic demand has shrunk.

Klosson said he is looking for the G-20 to follow through on commitments on food security made by G-8 leaders in L’Aquila, Italy, in July. At that summit, the G-8 pledged $20 billion for global food security and reassessed, at least on paper, how food assistance ought to be given.

He also warned that the world is falling dramatically short on the Millennium Development Goals, which are to be evaluated next September. Sixty-eight countries are responsible for 97 percent of deaths before the age of five, he said, and only 14 of those countries are on track to meet their child-mortality targets next year. The World Bank has found that as many as 400,000 additional babies could die every year until 2015 because of the recession.

"Why wait until next September?" Klosson asked. "There are things that can be done if we put our minds to it."