A new report by the ONE campaign shows how the UK aid budget will make a difference.
Today the ONE campaign has published a report that calculates what the UK international aid budget will actually be able to achieve between now and the next election. It is an incredibly important but also very clever interjection into the debate on overseas aid which continues to rage, despite the political consensus at the last election.
All three parties committed to meet the UN target of 0.7 per cent by 2013 in their manifestos, but the Conservatives went even further. Following Gordon Brown’s announcement at Labour’s 2009 party conference that Labour would legislate to make the commitment a legally binding target, the Conservative manifesto raised the stakes, declaring, on page 117:
A new Conservative government will be fully committed to achieving, by 2013, the UN target of spending 0.7% of national income as aid. We will stick to the rules laid down by the OECD about what spending counts as aid. We will legislate in the first session of a new Parliament to lock in this level of spending for every year from 2013.
Despite this being one of the longest ever sessions of Parliament, International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell has told journalists that there is no time for the legislation. So the ONE campaign has cleverly turned the debate from input – £8.6bn of your taxes – into outputs.
On the same day as the former Security Minister Lord West tells the Daily Telegraph that our aid budget should be cut in order to reinvest in the Royal Navy, the ONE campaign show us what your taxes can achieve. Lord West says he is “horrified our naval flotilla now comprises only 19 frigates and destroyers”. But ONE’s report reminds us of the horrifying fact that 50 million women around the world give birth outside of a health facility and without the support of a midwife or health worker.
On the same day we learn of a £2bn aircraft carrier procurement error, Lord West says our ability to recapture the Falkland Islands is at stake. But the ONE report reminds us that this year 358,000 mothers will die in unaided child birth and that 2.6 million stillbirths will result and a further 2.8 million children will die in their first week of life. As I argued when Liam Fox’s letter on the 0.7 per cent aid commitment leaked, there is no trade off between body armour and bednets. We can have both.
Mitchell made clear in the Sunday Times (£) yesterday, that development is a process and that aid is just a step on the developing world’s journey to self-sufficiency. The UK taxpayer should be proud that their country spends their taxes through a development department (DFID) and not an aid agency (like the State Department’s USAid).
Mitchell has decided that DFID will leave India in time for the next UK election because the country will be rich enough to deal with its own poverty. But there will still be around 400 million people living on less than 80p ($1.25) a day in India, more than in the 51 countries of sub-Saharan Africa put together. The £280m a year that the DFID saves will be reinvested not in warships but in water sanitation. Let’s just hope that India makes poverty reduction a priority but also be proud that the UK taxpayer made one big difference to the lives of the 1.2 million Indian children who have gone to primary school since 2003 thanks to us.
Richard Darlington was Special Adviser at DFID 2009-2010 and is now Head of News at IPPR – follow him on Twitter: @RDarlo
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