Yesterday there was a press conference to introduce the work of the Globalisation and Global Poverty Group being run by Peter Lilley. The Group will be reporting to the Shadow Cabinet next summer. It is good to see the areas the Group is planning to examine: they are going to spend considerable time looking at the role of enterprise-based solutions to poverty, and also look at how governance can be improved.

At the press launch, the FT’s Martin Wolf said he hoped that the Group would not simply produce “mush” but would “inject clarity and rigour” into the debate. We agree: there is simply no point in having a Group if it only issues Northern NGO-friendly soundbites. It also needs to avoid the temptation of just duplicating the Africa Commission report. Rather, it needs to look at the new thinking in development, and harness the private sector to generate growth and prosperity in Africa and developing countries as a whole.

One of the board members of the Group, Will Day, the former head of Care International and now Special Adviser to the UN Development Programme, spoke of how for twenty years the development community has called for more attention to be placed on global poverty, and now that there is a lot of attention, they need to actually deliver: to ensure that money is being used properly. He said that “the opposite of poverty is prosperity but too often the development community has thought it is welfare.” The development community, he said, needs “a better understanding wealth creation”. Absolutely.

The Policy Group’s website is available here.