60 seconds with Giles Bolton

Following her review of Poor Story, Jane Goode chats to its author Giles Bolton.

Giles Bolton ''It might sound strange to campaign for things already agreed, but the biggest priority for Oxfam and other supporters must be to press G8 leaders to deliver what they promised in 2005.'' Giles Bolton: Poor Story

Why this book, why now?

After 10 years as an aid worker, I’d basically become disillusioned.
Rather than working in the field, I felt the best way for me to make a difference was to help more people back home understand the real problems, and try and persuade them to battle for change.

There have been many books published about the state of Africa, what makes yours different?
Well, hopefully it’s much more accessible than most. So much writing on Africa and aid is dry and academic. One of the things my book does is follow some very nice people I met in Kenya and the Congo, and uses them to explain and evaluate how different types of aid and trade affect them. Another chapter makes the reader President of a fictional African country and sees whether they can handle all the challenges poor countries face.

The book also directly answers the questions people have: how much of our aid money is corrupted; what would fairer trade mean for our jobs in Britain; did 2005 and Make Poverty History change anything?

How can individual people in the West best donate their time and money to helping Africa in your opinion?
Donating to charities can help – it can make real differences to individual people’s lives – but the big ‘wins’ are in improving what our governments do with their large-scale money, and encouraging the businesses we buy from to invest more in Africa.

Is buying fair-trade goods enough to level the economic playing field? What else can the public do in this respect?

Fairtrade can never be the answer to the big-picture. It does have very important benefits for several million farmers round the world – but there are hundreds of millions who don’t benefit. We need to make trade rules themselves fairer so African farmers aren’t dependent on the generosity of British and other shoppers to pay higher, Fairtrade prices.


Can you summarise for me what action you think the British government needs to take in the fight against poverty i.e. what should we be campaigning for?

It might sound strange to campaign for things already agreed, but the biggest priority for Oxfam and other supporters must be to press G8 leaders to deliver what they promised in 2005. What 2005 achieved on aid, trade and debt was genuinely unprecedented – personally, it convinced me to go back to working in aid because I felt, for the first time, that the world was at least talking about the issues that matter – but the reality may not prove as good as the rhetoric.
The UK is actually doing much better than most G8 countries. But we still need to keep the pressure on our politicians.