Paul Vallely

Paul Vallely CMG is a leading British writer on Africa and development issues. He first coined, in his seminal 1990 book Bad Samaritans: First World Ethics and Third World Debt, the expression that campaigners needed to move "from charity to justice" – a slogan that was taken up by Jubilee 2000 and Live 8.

Vallely was correspondent for The Times in Ethiopia during the great famine of 1984/5. He was commended as International Reporter of the Year for his reports which Bob Geldof described as "vivid, intelligent, moving and brave". Vallely was the only British correspondent to leave the easy air routes to the feeding camps and strike off across country to find out what was really going on. He uncovered a number of scandals the Marxist government were trying to keep hidden, was pronounced “an enemy of the revolution”, arrested by the secret police and was expelled from the country. He subsequently reported from across Africa, and elsewhere, covering wars and events in 30 different countries across the globe.

In 2004/5 he was co-author of the report of the Commission for Africa set up by the British prime minister, Tony Blair, of which Bob Geldof was a member. Vallely ghost-wrote Geldof's autobiography, Is That It? in 1985 and travelled with Bob Geldof across Africa to decide how to spend the £100m raised by Live Aid and was involved in the organisation of Live 8.

Bob Geldof paid tribute to his influence in a lecture to the Bar Human Rights Committee Lecture, St. Paul’s Cathedral in which he said: "In his book Bad Samaritans of 1990 Paul Vallely wrote correctly: 'For all his skill as a populist Bob Geldof could not shift the agenda from one of charity to one of justice.” Well maybe after 20 years we’ve finally got there." The founders of Jubilee 2000, Martin Dent and Bill Peters, have also acknowledged being inspired by Vallely's book. (The book is sometimes confused with the 2007 text Bad Samaritans: Rich Nations, Poor Policies and the Threat to the Developing World by the economist Ha-Joon Chang which also argues that the current economic policies supported by the IMF and wealthy countries are hindering development and creating poverty.)

Vallely has chaired or been active in a number of prominent UK aid agencies, including Traidcraft, the Catholic Institute for International Relations (CIIR), Christian Aid and CAFOD. He has been an adviser to the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales and was the author of their report A place of redemption: a Christian approach to punishment and prison. (Catholic Bishop's Conference of England & Wales, 2004).

He is the associate editor of the UK newspaper The Independent where he writes about ethical, cultural and political issues. (He was once referred to by Peter Wilby in New Statesman as "the Independent's resident saint"). He is also a columnist for The Church Times and Third Way Magazine. He is a director of The Tablet.

Vallely was created a Companion of St Michael and St George (CMG) "for services to journalism and to the developing world" on 17 June 2006.

He is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures at the University of Manchester.

In 2008 he was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, the pre-eminent prize in Britain for political writing.