Susan Dalgety: Scots put the practical ahead of theory for Malawi

The eight pledges were signed in 2000 to almost universal acclaim; but a decade and a deluge of humanitarian disasters later and the MDGs are now the subject of much-heated debate as to whether they will be met by the 2015 deadline – or even if the approach was the right one.

Here in Scotland there has been a quiet revolution in aid developing over the last five years – Scotland's partnership with Malawi. It has its genesis in Dr David Livingstone and is that most rare of public policies, one embraced by all Scotland's political parties.

It even got its own set of official goals, when Jack McConnell signed a Co-operation Agreement with Malawi's President, Professor Bingu wa Mutharika in November 2005. Scots young and old, expert and amateur, rich and poor, have embraced Malawi's development challenges as their own.

More than 200 schools are twinned with schools in Malawi. One Glasgow school has raised a six-figure sum to build a school complex. Dunoon native, John McAslan, the head of an international architectural practice, has designed, free of charge, a prototype classroom block which could change the face of education in Malawi.

Scots generosity has replaced Bottom Hospital, one of the world's worst maternity units, with an emergency obstetrics hospital. In the first two months since its opening there were no maternal deaths – almost a miracle in a country where maternal death rates are medieval in scale.

It is this determination to make a practical and personal contribution to Malawi's development, rather than leave it to the poverty experts, that distinguishes this friendship from other aid efforts.

Goals, no matter how well-intentioned, do not in themselves change the world. Only people can do that and Scotland and Malawi are showing the way.

• Susan Dalgety is co-vice chairperson of the Scotland Malawi Partnership