G8 campaigning off to early start

In July this year, the leaders of the world's eight most most industrialised countries (commonly known as the G8) will come together for their annual summit, which will this year be held in Japan.

It's a couple of months away yet, but we've already started to ramp up the pressure and have just this week unveiled a super newfangled G8 action, which you can use to tell the G8 to take Action Now to end poverty and inequality.

As it uses bright and bold colours, and contains animation, it looks a bit different to the actions we normally have on our website, and (even we say so ourselves) we think it's pretty snazzy.

But the difference is not just skin deep. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, the action can be added to other websites. There's another example on the whiteband website.

We've gone to all this effort to create something different because decisions made by the G8 have a huge impact.

During the 2005 summit, debt cancellation and aid increases were agreed for some of the world's poorest countries.

Zambia was one of the countries that benefited. They received debt cancellation, and since then the Zambian government has been able to introduce free health care for people in rural areas - scrapping fees that once stopped millions getting care they needed.

However, the last two year's summits have been rather more underwhelming, despite that fact that great things were promised.

At this year's summit we're campaigning for the G8 leaders to pull their socks up and show us what they're really capable of.

Over the next two months running up to the summit, we're hoping that the action will be hosted on more and more websites, that it will spread across the tentacles of the web, and that we'll create one deafening global call for world leaders to act.