Last week I traveled through Kentucky with Jubilee USA’s 2006 Global Connections Tour and learned how, one year after the 2005 G8 Summit, debt cancellation is helping fight poverty around the world.

On the tour, Charity Musamba (National Coordinator for the Debt Cancellation and Trade Justice Project of Jubilee Zambia) told us that Zambia has been able to spend money that used to go to debt on education and healthcare. Now Zambia has hired 4,500 new teachers and abolished rural health care fees.

For me this is an exciting update! I was one of a million people who attended the LIVE 8 concert in Philadelphia in July 2005 where we sent President Bush to the G8 Summit on a wave of support to do more to fight AIDS and extreme poverty.

At the Summit, the G8 leaders reached an unprecedented agreement:

• $50 billion more in effective international assistance per year by 2010, half of which goes to Africa;
• Near universal access to AIDS drugs to all those who need it, and care for AIDS orphans;
• Primary schools for ALL children by 2015;
• A commitment to reduce the impact of malaria by 85% and help save the lives of 600,000 children every year;
• And 100% debt cancellation for the world’s poorest countries.

These promises are a historic opportunity to fight global AIDS and extreme poverty and save millions of lives. If kept, the G8 promises are life-saving, powerful enough to save at least 4 million lives a year. While we still have much work to do to ensure that the 2005 G8 Summit agreements are kept, it is exciting to hear how the debt cancellation deal is being used to help fight poverty in Zambia right now.