Comment: Aid is utterly vital – and it works
Andrew Mitchell is right: India still needs help to tackle its population’s poverty, while fragile states contain some of the hardest to reach pockets of deprivation in the world.
By Jonathan Tench
This week saw one of the biggest shake-ups in UK international development policy since the creation of the Department for International Development (DfID) in 1997. While ActionAid poured over the detail of how the aid money would be spent, aid sceptics, including some MPs, continued to question why we were giving aid at all.
Others questioned where the aid was going – the aid to India question loomed large in the media, as did a few question marks over increasing aid to fragile states.
Why give aid? Firstly, it is still utterly vital. We live in a grossly unequal world where nearly a billion people go to bed hungry every night. A woman still dies every minute of every day due to pregnancy related causes. And I’ve seen with my own eyes, children scavenging in Kenya on a rubbish tip for something to eat or sell. Aid is a lifeline to many of the poorest people on the planet.
But contrary to the doubts of aid sceptics, aid works. Thanks to UK taxpayers’ money children from east to west Africa enjoy free universal primary education. In Ethiopia, the number of people living in poverty dropped by a third. Huge gains have been made reducing hunger and malnutrition in Malawi. The number of people on lifesaving anti-AIDS drugs has increased from 400,000 in 2003 to more than four million in 2008.
When it’s spent well, aid delivers superb value for money. DfID spent £20 million on improving Rwanda’s tax collection – resulting in tax revenue there quadrupling to over £240 million since 1997. Crucially, this helps Rwanda become less dependent on aid to build the schools and hospitals it desperately needs. This is aid as a hand-up, not a hand-out.
We don’t just think the coalition is being bold by protecting aid spending is brave in today’s economic climate, we think it’s being guided by good old British values of common sense and justice.
Where and how to spend UK aid are more difficult questions. This week development secretary Andrew Mitchell proposed focusing DFID’s work on fragile states, girls’ education and on making UK aid more effective.
In ActionAid’s experience, the discrimination and violence women in developing countries face on a daily basis, and the denial of their economic and political rights, are the biggest obstacles to development. Getting more girls into school is an important building block not only to development – but to help girls and women realize their rights to work, opportunity, education and political participation and freedom from violence.
But it was DfID’s decision to continue aid spending in India that set pulses in Westminster racing this week. India’s space programme and its surging economy are cited as reasons to slash aid to the country. Set aside the fact that India’s space programme is decades old (and that satellite analysis has real advantages for improving weather and agricultural knowledge). Focus instead on the fact that there are more poor people in India than the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. GDP per head in India is around $1,000 compared to around $35,000 in the UK. India still needs help to tackle the sheer depth and breadth of poverty its population lives in.
The world will never meet the UN Millennium development goals, to halve global poverty, unless we see more progress in India. The UK’s aid effort will target India’s poorest states and while their government does need to do more (and is doing so through an ambitious welfare programme), continued UK aid is necessary to lift some of the world’s poorest citizens out of poverty.
UK aid will be doubly effective if some of it can help local organisations monitor the Indian government’s anti-poverty programmes, to make sure money is better spent and reaches the right people.
When the last Labour government created DfID, not only did it treble aid spending, but it made sure the foremost goal of UK aid became the alleviation of poverty. This week the degree to which the coalition government is linking UK aid to the UK’s national security needs raised some eyebrows. By 2013, a third of UK aid will be spent in fragile states, which the coalition government says pose a global (and UK) security threat.
Well this isn’t really new, since we already spend 22% of our aid in fragile states. It also makes sense – ActionAid agrees with the analysis that Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia contain some of the hardest to reach pockets of deprivation in the world, which are furthest away from achieving the MDGs. The real issue for ActionAid is how and who delivers aid in these contexts.
The image of soldiers building a school is almost a cliché, but the reality from Afghanistan is that military forces have an abysmal record of delivering development projects, far better to spend through civilian actors, like local government.
During these times of economic austerity the British taxpayer wants to be reassured that aid money is not being wasted in corruption and inefficiency. This is driving a greater emphasis on effectiveness, and we applaud Andrew Mitchell’s creation of a new independent watchdog to scrutinize aid spending, especially the appointment of Kenya’s former anti-corruption tsar, John Githongo.
But the poorest and most marginalised people in the world also want value for money. Helping them to hold their own governments to account is an important goal – and the prize is not just making it easier to argue against the aid sceptics, it’s giving those at the very bottom of the heap some power over their own lives.
Jonathan Tench is the government relations adviser at ActionAid UK. To find out more about ActionAid’s work visit: www.actionaid.org.
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