“HOW will the future judge us if we do not respond when we know we have the tools to do so?” Dame Carol Kidu asked the audience attending the Health at Whose Cost session of the Melbourne Writers Festival.

Dame Kidu was one of four speakers discussing ways to provide aid to those suffering health crises worldwide, an part of the public program of the 63rd annual United Nations DPI/NGO conference 'Global Health Challenges: Achieving the Millennium Development Goals’.

According to fellow speaker Sir Gustav Nossal, the global financial crisis proved the world to be capable of providing large amounts of aid.

Sir Nossal, affectionately known ‘Sir Gus’, said the sum of the world’s stimulus packages amounted to approximately two trillion dollars.

“If there’s a political will, there’s a way,” he said.

Where Dr Sakena Yacoobi comes from, political will is the problem.

Dr Yacoobi has been risking her life to share her education and aid with the women and children of Afghanistan for the past 30 years.

“It is not hard to do it, but there is a system stopping us,” she said.

According to Dr Yacoobi, the majority of Afghan women do not have even the most basic knowledge about their bodies, hygiene and health.

“Many of them had children as children,” she said.

Her constant challenge is to teach the Afghan people- especially women, and their children- how to protect themselves from disease, both physical and sociological.

Afghan women, she said, have been completely ignored for years- or worse.

“The first frustrations for men in war are their women and children,” Dr Yacoobi said.

Though Dame Kidu’s work in Papua New Guinea (PNG) is similarly concerned with women’s issues, especially maternal mortality rates, her challenges differ from those of Dr Yacoobi.

While Dr Yacoobi battles constant threats to both her personal security and those of the people she aids, Dame Kidu struggles against the remoteness of some of PNG’s poorest communities.

She recalled an instance in which a husband carried his wife in a food sack on his back for two days while she experienced horrific complications during childbirth.

Despite his best efforts to seek help, both mother and child perished.

For the people both Dame Kidu and Dr Yacoobi serve, there is a tendency to become fatalistic.

“It’s not just women’s business,” Dame Kidu said.

“Every mother matters. It’s everybody’s business.”

All four members of the panel agreed education and eliminating poverty to be the key to improving world health.

Though, Sir Gus said, there had been some remarkable signs of improvement in the course of the decade.

His recent ventures to reduce the incidence of malaria worldwide have been largely successful.

Dr Yacoobi also said she had seen a vast improvement in the education and wellbeing in the two decades since she began her work.

According to author and experienced international aid worker Angela Savage, education is always the first thing people in need of help beg for.

“But children can’t go to school if they’re sick,” she said.

Thus, she reasoned that poverty needed to be addressed to improve the prospects of existing education and health initiatives.

According to Dame Kidu, education distribution must be approached differently to become more effective.

She voiced a need to look beyond traditional formal education systems to inject education directly into disadvantaged communities.

“We’ve got to get the modern technology into flexible outward learning,” Dame Kidu said.

In PNG, 97 per cent of land belongs to and is inhabited by its people.

However, Sir Gus raised a more chilling challenge than remote rural communities in educating women.

“The central problem is that male-dominated societies are not as dedicated to women’s education as the people in this room,” he said.

“Health and education are both important, but education is just a bit more important,” Sir Gus said.

He expressed particular outrage at the Australian government’s willingness to “steal” doctors and nurses from countries that need them.

Over half the population of general medical practitioners in Australia in 2006 were born overseas, approximately 10 percent of whom had arrived in Australia within five years of the census.  

The Australian Bureau of Statistics attributes the growth in the influx of medically trained persons from overseas to the General Skilled Migration programme.

The need to improve education, especially where health is concerned, is not exclusive to developing nations.

Ms Savage, however, is hopeful.

“I have no reason to do anything but hope,” she said.

And by her accord, the world has no excuse not to act.

Video footage of the session and further information are available on One Just World. Further information is also available at Making Health Global.