The National Lottery, as we're always told, funds numerous good causes. We quite often hear of some odd and obscure ones in there, like teaching Peruvians to dance or funding support groups for Yemenis who've lost their yaks, but it's interesting to take a look at the amount of money going abroad.
£5,168,087 to University College London - Institute of Child Health for projects that "focus on mother and child health. The Institute of Child Health (ICH) at University College London (UCL) and its partner, Women and Children First (WCF), are currently running community based projects in Bangladesh and India".
£5,110,820 went to Helpage International for "nine projects, of which there are seven standalone projects that focus on HIV/AIDS in Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, South Africa and Ethiopia. They will cohesively filter into project one for local, regional and global advocacy for all regions and project nine for dissemination of best practice".
CARE International UK will "work hard to reach mobile populations who are more vulnerable to HIV/AIDS in India, Nepal and Bangladesh. Projects will include improving access to HIV prevention, care and support, setting up a Regional Research Centre, enhancing the capacity of government, civil society and community efforts to reduce the vulnerability of mobile populations and their families to HIV and to mitigate the impact of AIDS. Mobile populations include women and men who move to India in search of work" and got £5,102,419 towards that.
£3,792,311 was awarded to Skillshare International who are "Working in Swaziland, Mozambique, Lesotho, Botswana and South Africa, this project addresses the current gaps in implementation of the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) Plan of Action for HIV/AIDS, targeting the most vulnerable people and areas within the action plan".
And, we could go on forever here, but this is the last example we'll give, £2,878,088 to enable Interact Worldwide to "contribute principally to improved mother and child health but also to improved measures to tackle HIV/AIDS by contributing to improving maternal and neonatal health in highly underserved areas of Sub Saharan Africa. It will aim to close the gap between the community and the healthcare system. This portfolio consists of three new projects which will focus on mother and newborn health in Ethiopia, Malawi and Uganda"
That's just the top 5 foreign project recipients from a glance at the figures provided by lottery.culture.gov.uk - it should be noted that there are a whole lot more foreign projects, and that these donations stretch back over many years.
Taking a look at the National Lottery page today, we're tod that the next Lotto jackpot on Wednesday will be an estimated £2,200,000.
With a quick total of the above 5 figures for foreign projects lottery money went to, we end up with £22,051,725.
It's a rollover! Just those 5 'good causes' ate up ten times more money than the current jackpot is.
As if we're not paying out enough in foreign aid already, and many give generously to all kinds of charitable groups, if we take a look overall, searching foreign projects on the culture.gov.uk site tells us that there have been 1131 grants to projects they class as 'Overseas' for a total of.....£244,074,737.
That's a whole lot of rollovers to get there, we really could say that foreign nations have won Britains National Lottery, and won it many times over.
