Gordon Brown is expected to announce today that the UK will top the generosity of Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates with a donation of $1.8bn (nearly £1bn) for vaccines to protect children in poor countries from disease.
The substantial UK contribution, over 15 years, is almost twice that of Mr Gates and the Norwegian government, who together announced around $1bn for the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (Gavi) on Monday. Mr Brown will also announce £1.4bn over three years to help more girls in developing countries to get an education.
The chancellor and the international development secretary, Hilary Benn, will challenge rich countries to follow the UK's lead and commit a total of $4bn to Gavi over the next 10 years, which could save five million children's lives from diseases such as diphtheria, tetanus and measles up to 2015 - and five million more after that.
Mr Brown will make the announcement at a seminar organised by the Department for International Development and the United Nations Development Programme, where he will launch the UK's five-point implementation plan to meet the millennium development goals set by the United Nations for 2015.
He will say that debt relief, more generous aid, higher levels of trade, health and education are the areas where the international community has to act. "Concerted and comprehensive action is needed now if the world is to realise the ambition of the millennium declaration agreed in New York in 2000." he will say
Central to the plan are measures to tackle childhood diseases, such as malaria, which kills a million people a year, and HIV/Aids, which is laying waste sub-Saharan Africa. Gavi is an early and important focus, because the chancellor wants the rich world to agree to fund it through a pilot project of the internationl finance facility (IFF), a scheme to raise billions by floating government-backed bonds in the financial markets. If all goes well with Gavi, Mr Brown wants to use the IFF to raise $50bn a year, doubling the present amount available for development aid.
A substantial tranche of the money would go to the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria which gives grants to poor countries whose plans for tackling disease it approves. Half the grants have gone to plans for drug treatment and prevention of Aids and 60% of the money has gone to Africa.
But the fund struggles for sufficient money from donor countries. The chancellor's comprehensive strategy for HIV/Aids, part of the five-point plan, will delight campaigners by calling for the fund's income to rise dramatically to around $7bnor more a year by 2010 through the IFF.
HIV/Aids has brought life expectancy in Africa down from 62 to 47 years and left 11 million children without a parent. "Years from now people will ask about Aids and Africa: how could the world have known and failed to act?" Mr Brown told the Guardian.
He wants to double the funding of research into an HIV/Aids vaccine and offer incentives to pharmaceutical companies large and small by pre-purchase schemes for Aids and malaria vaccines, guaranteeing a market.
Today's event marks the start of a flurry of diplomacy over the next week, which will include a visit by the chancellor and the prime minister to the World Economic Forum in Davos and a gathering of G7 finance ministers in London at the end of next week.
