Brown tries to help 67 million children

Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, is today making a fresh attempt to tackle poverty in the Third World, after the failure of negotiations in Bali a week ago.

He is urging his fellow finance ministers from the world's richest countries, who are meeting in Halifax, Canada, to launch a campaign to provide schooling for 67 million children who cannot get any education. He also hopes to persuade them to take steps to reduce hunger and disease, and to provide more aid.

On Wednesday in London he privately met Paul O'Neill, the US Treasury Secretary, to try to get him to sign up to a "Marshall Plan" for the world's poorest countries – after first seeking advice from the rock star Bono.

Mr Brown acknowledges that the U2 singer – who has helped to convince President Bush to increase aid, and has recently accompanied Mr O'Neill on a tour of Africa – is particularly "effective" in persuading the US administration to take action.

Mr Brown, who has a long-standing personal commitment to tackling Third World poverty, accepts that the failure of the talks in Bali – the final negotiations to prepare for a special Earth Summit in Johannesburg in August – was a serious setback. But he insists there is an unprecedented opportunity for "a new deal between the developed and developing world".

Under the deal, he says, rich countries would provide "vastly increased resources" in aid to poor countries in return for measures to tackle corruption and poverty and to open up their markets to trade and investment.

"This generation has the power, resources, technology and science to deliver the world from poverty," he said before his meeting with Mr O'Neill last week. "But, at the end of the day, it is going to come back to the political will of individual countries to take action."

At today's meeting, Mr Brown will urge his colleagues to back a new World Bank plan to fast-track aid to 23 countries – containing more than half of the 113 million children now out of school in the Third World – in return for plans to increase primary education.

He also wants them to take similar steps to tackle avoidable diseases – mainly from drinking dirty water – that kill 10 million children in poor countries every year, one of the main issues that will be on the table in Johannesburg. And he wants rich countries to make long-term commitments to double their aid.