But states also face risks from the economy, federal budget cuts and increased demands for help from local governments that are seeing property tax collections plummet.
With budgets tight at home, and noisy demands for help from domestic constituencies, however, Brown is concerned many countries are failing even to live up to the promises on aid they made at the Gleneagles G8 meeting in 2005.
Recently, the demand for help for this target group has been on the rise.
For welfare charity Jewish Care, the new year period from Rosh Hashanah, last week, to Yom Kippur, which begins this evening, brings a surge in demand for help, mostly from young, mentally ill and isolated elderly people.
Governments, increasingly struggling to meet society's demands, are desperate for help from someone more creative than the typical bureaucrat.Businesses, as this week's special report in The Economist makes clear (see article), want to engage in socially responsible but still entrepreneurial schemes that let them "do well by doing good".
"The truth is that the demand for help is up dramatically from last year," says Randi Shubin Dresner, the president of Island Harvest.
"It comes at a time when we have seen a huge increase in demand for urgent help from Mind's infoline, which means we're currently able to support just over half of the people who call.
Local authorities are preparing to invest in charity-run food banks to cope with an expected deluge in demand for crisis help from low income families hit by welfare cuts, raising the spectre of depression-era US "breadlines".
The demand for help is growing, too.
As the demand for help increased, the clinic increased to three days per week.
