Brown in talks over huge increase in aid

Gordon Brown has risked missing the birth of his child to rush to Dubai this weekend to help broker a new deal which will lead to a vast increase in development aid to the Third World.

While his wife, Sarah, is heavily pregnant with their second child, due next month, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has been limiting his public engagements to be sure of being present at the birth. The couple's first child, Jennifer Jane, was born prematurely in December 2001 and died 10 days later. But on Friday evening he flew to Dubai for the first major gathering of world finance ministers since the World Trade Organisation talks in Cancun, Mexico, broke up in disagreement.

Mr Brown has been heavily involved in promoting the internationally agreed Millennium Development Goals under which every child in the world will have a school education and poverty around the globe will have been halved by 2015.

The Chancellor, who will chair an International Monetary Fund committee meeting in Dubai today, has warned that the money already promised by the US and the European Union is too little to meet the education target. He has also warned that too little money has been set aside to combat tuberculosis, malaria and Aids.

Writing in The Independent on Sunday today, he warns: "The collapse of the WTO talks has been a bitter disappointment for a world that must fight a war, not just against global terrorism but against global poverty. So in our decision at Dubai, we must show that global economic change need not impoverish millions but can enrich even the poorest and bring social justice on a global scale."

A paper presented to the finance ministers yesterday stated that developing nations need an immediate injection of $30bn (£18bn) in extra aid, with at least another £12.5bn to follow. The paper, drawn up by the World Bank, includes the first set of country-by-country case studies to answer questions about how much aid the political and social infrastructure of an individual country is capable of absorbing effectively.

Some large Asian states, including India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Pakistan, and some African countries like Ethiopia are judged to be sufficiently well governed, and suffering from sufficiently high levels of poverty, for aid levels to be at least doubled.