Gordon Brown, Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, will throw his weight behind global initiatives to tackle killer diseases in the developing world when he uses a visit to the World Economic Forum to try to placate accusations that the West’s rich economies have failed to deliver on pledges of help for the poorest countries.

The Chancellor will fly into Davos on Friday for a series of high-profile meetings and appearances with leading development campaigners including Bono, the U2 rock star, and Bill Gates, the billionaire Microsoft founder.

Mr Brown will use the platform provided by Davos to launch a renewed push for further commitments from the G7 leading economies on aid, disease and debt relief for the Third World ahead of the group's meeting in Moscow next month.

At the Moscow G7 talks, Britain also intends to set out plans to expand debt relief for poor nations.

But the Chancellor is expected to come under fire in Davos today from Bono and other campaigners over Britain’s decision to accept $1.7 billion in debt repayments from Nigeria, under a deal with the Paris Club of rich donor countries to write-off part of the African state’s $30 billion (£17 billion) debt burden.

Development groups believe that Britain should not take the money from a country which, despite being the world’s third largest oil producer, still suffers from endemic poverty among much of its population.

Yesterday, Mr Brown announced that Britain will contribute £41.7 million to fight tuberculosis in India as part of a new multi-billion dollar fund to combat the disease worldwide.

The $5.5 billion (£3.14 billion) Global Fund to Stop Tuberculosis will be launched by the Chancellor alongside Mr Gates, whose Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is in the vanguard of efforts to tackle the scourge of lethal disease in the developing world.

Campaigners say that TB is responsible for killing 2 million people a year - one person every 15 seconds. India’s 15 million TB patients account for nearly one-third of the world’s cases.

If anti-TB efforts are not strengthened, an estimated 1 billion people will be infected by 2020 and 36 million people worldwide could die, the Treasury said.

The global plan will call for a tripling of spending to fight the disease in the next decade to increase access to control programmes and accelerate research into ways of tackling the disease.

Mr Brown will also attempt to garner support for a separate initiative under which rich nations would agree to "block purchase" vaccines for diseases that blight the developing world in order to guarantee a flow of funds to the pharmaceutical industry to back research programmes.

Mr Gates and the Chancellor will brief Forum participants on the progress of the international finance facility for immunisation - a scheme under which donor countries provide guarantees of a future stream of funding in order to raise cash through capital markets to pay for vaccine research and programmes of vaccination in the Third World.

Mr Brown will join Bono and Paul Wolfowitz, the president of the World Bank, to discuss efforts to give greater priority to universal free education for children across the globe.

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