The book is fantastic – in just a few pages it manages to outline, in layman’s terms, the major issues around the inequalities between the developing and developed world and how poverty, education, disease, trade, investment and foreign aid are all linked to one another. The book gives a very positive message of how things can improve and is extremely encouraging to get people involved. It contains pointers to a variety of resources and presents practical ways to help – from spending a period of time overseas with VSO, choosing to buy more fairly-traded goods or switching your bank account to a company with an ethical policy, such as Smile.co.uk. We don’t all have to give up our lives and travel to third-world countries to make a difference, but we can all do a bit more to make things better.
The full book is available for download from the website.
On the point about switching bank accounts, I actually moved my current and savings accounts from Barclays to Smile.co.uk about nine months ago, as well as taking a new credit card. I thought it would be horrible – having been with Barclays all my life I had a mountain of direct debits to pay that all came out of my account at different times and had to be sure that the mortgage was paid on time, but they made it easy – after filling in an application and sending off a few copies of bills etc they switched everything for me.
Not only do Smile.co.uk have an ethical policy but they also pay much more interest on their current accounts than Barclays – 3.25% instead of 0.1% at the time of writing. It makes sense in every way to switch over.
If you don’t fancy Smile.co.uk and their groovy pink lettering, other ethical alternatives are The Co-operative Bank (actually the same company as Smile.co.uk) and Triodos Bank.
The Rough Guide to a Better World is really good, there was a huge need for a book like this. I really recommend people to download a copy and have a read.