Campaign urges Poles to stop complaining and start helping others

A new campaign urging Poles to up their spending on humanitarian aid to developing countries has been launched in Warsaw under the auspices of the United Nations Development Programme and the Polish Foreign Ministry. The "Time to Help Others" campaign hopes to stimulate public awareness of the needs of other nations and make Poles realize that they are much better off than 150 countries around the world.

"I think Poland should help other nations because a few years ago, 20 or 15 years ago, many, many richer countries helped Poland and Poland should help other nations - from the East, from Africa."

I was talking to this student beneath one of many billboards on display in the city which read 'Poland is a paradise' - for 1.2 billion people around the world. Poles earn an average of 11,000 US dollars per capita per year, and this is indeed a paradise for those who live on less than one dollar a day. Sixty three percent of Poles think that Poland should help the poorest nations but as Jan Szczycinski of the Warsaw office of the UN Development Programme told me, such a view is gaining ground slowly:

"This is a very difficult mental change in the attitude of Poles towards other countries, towards development assistance because we still consider ourselves mainly as recipients of development aid from other countries. We still consider ourselves as being poor which is, of course, relatively true, taking into account, for example, the rate of unemployment at 19 percent. But compared to other countries we are really, really rich and becoming even richer."

Indeed Poland is richer than some 150 other countries in the world. So, 'Time to Help Others' seems to be a very fitting motto for the campaign. According to Jakub Boratynski of the Batory Foundation in Warsaw, the activity of some charities and individuals has been crucial in stimulating public awareness of the needs of other nations.

"The first person among the ranks is certainly Janina Ochojska, who is the leader of the Polish Humanitarian Organization. She has clearly shown to the Polish people that we could share and contribute to relieve the suffering of people, not just in our country but elsewhere. And I think this is a very practical example, that we help people to understand that we are actually doing quite well."

The campaign which has just been launched in Warsaw is intended to begin a public debate on development assistance for poorer countries. Jan Szczycinski of the UN Development Programme again:

"We want to make people think about it because this is something quite new in our country. They should think if Poland should help, why Poland should help, where it should help, to what extent, what the priorities are, and so on. In the long term the goal is to build and improve the awareness of people about the needs and situations of other much poorer countries than Poland and build public support for a development cooperation system of Poland."

Last year Poland contributed 27 million dollars to development assistance programmes. In two years, the amount is to grow to 130 million. This is only a fraction of 0.39 per cent of GDP - which European Union members pledged to spend on such schemes.