SIR - Classrooms with teachers, clinics with nurses, running taps and working toilets.

These basic services are of concern to all of us. But according to research by Oxfam, they are also the key to ending global poverty.

To tackle poverty, developing-country governments must devote a greater proportion of their budgets to building these vital services for their citizens - and for rich countries must support their plans with increased, long-term aid.

Sri Lanka, Botswana, Malaysia and Kerala state in India have, within a generation, made health and education advances that took industrialised countries more than a century to achieve.

We have the means to ensure that within a generation, every child in the world could be in school, every woman could give birth with proper health care, everyone could drink clean, safe water, and millions of new health workers and teachers could be saving lives and shaping minds. We should accept nothing less.

Bill Adams, TUC Regional Secretary, Yorkshire and the Humber; Rachel Curtis, Chairman of Bradford VSO Group; Kim Tan, Oxfam Campaigns Officer, Yorkshire and the North-East; Professor John Wright, Clinical Director, Bradford Teaching Hospital Trust