Blair and Brown will urge wealthiest nations to double aid for Third World

Britain will urge the world's richest nations this week to double the total aid budget for developing countries to $100bn (£60bn) a year to halve global poverty.

Tony Blair will propose the scheme, drawn up by Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, at a summit of G8 leaders in Evian, France, this weekend. Leaders from the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Canada and Russia will attend.

Discussion on the proposed "Marshall plan" for the Third World was delayed by the Iraq war, but it could be revived as a means of binding the international wounds left by the conflict. It has won support in France and America.

Under Mr Brown's plan, the developed world would double its aid budget in return for pledges of stable growth and anti-corruption measures by poor nations. An "international finance facility" would ensure that the Third World received more money in the short term from bonds issued in the international capital markets against long-term aid commitments by rich countries.

Without such a scheme, the Chancellor is worried that the world will fail to meet the United Nations "millennium goals", which stipulate that every child should go to school, poverty be halved and infant and maternal mortality be reduced by 2015. British officials are playing down talk of a breakthrough on the plan at the summit, but hope that the G8 leaders will give it some momentum. The main issues on the agenda are expected to be Iraq, terrorism, the world economy and aid.

Finance ministers from the G8 countries and the European Union are taking a close interest in the Brown plan and have agreed to produce reports on the issue. America could hold the key to its success. There is concern in Washington that one Congress should not bind its successors to a long-term financial commitment. But President George Bush is more interested in aid than his image as a unilateralist suggests.

British officials are hopeful of winning formal backing from America. "It is going to take time. There are technical issues to be resolved, but we do not think they are insurmountable," one Treasury source said yesterday.

The musician Bob Geldof, who returns to Ethiopa this week for the first time since Live Aid in 1985, said yesterday that he hoped his visit would persuade the G8 leaders to take the aid issue more seriously. He feared the meeting would be a "ya-boo sucks summit" after the Iraq war.

Mr Geldof praised the Prime Minister and the Chancellor for their efforts, and said that President Bush was taking Africa more seriously than any US President since John F Kennedy in the 1960s.