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Small as it is, DfID’s £100 million governance and transparency fund is a brave beginning. I genuinely wish it well if it can find meaningful channels of support. I repeat a warning from Christian Aid, with which I have had a long association:
“The Government’s agenda seems far more focused on what developing countries have to do and how the UK will support them, rather than on tackling the role played by rich countries and northern companies in facilitating corruption. For example, while stating its intention to help developing countries track assets it is unconvincing on [its] own commitment to take strong action to trace and repatriate illicitly acquired funds and assets already in the UK”.
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, on that. The Government’s experience with the World Bank’s anti-corruption framework leads me to think that they see the bank’s approach as a slippery slope and not necessarily a path to development.
The key partners of DfID are, of course, potentially not Governments but civil society organisations, including not only NGOs but community groups, trade unions, professional associations and academic institutions. The number of CSOs in developing countries is growing fast and more and more of them recognise that advocacy is a way of bringing their own Government to account. Generally, the results are disappointing. I am among those who, perhaps like the noble Lord, Lord Judd, would like to see much more political activity within the CSOs, but in Africa and many other parts of the
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However, more countries are having success by targeting their activity. In Mozambique, for example, many NGOs base their advocacy on the PARPA, the Government’s poverty reduction country programme, and the level and awareness of corruption and the need for transparency in government has certainly had an effect there. There are similar advances in Uganda.
The Overseas Development Institute has recently focused on the subject of policy engagement for poverty reduction and how civil society can be more effective. It shows how some states have started their own civil society initiative, such as Bulgaria’s Coalition 2000. It argues that policy-makers and donors could help by working to ensure that political freedoms are in place, making policy processes more transparent and diversifying their support to the CSO sector beyond NGOs. I am sure, and I hope that, knowing DfID’s co-operation with the ODI over many years, it is taking these ideas very seriously.
On fragile states, I was cheered to see that the Secretary of State said last month:
“DfID is committed to working not only in countries which are performing well, but also in fragile states and to finding ways of working more effectively in these states”.
The International Development Committee said recently:
“We were particularly pleased that DFID recognised the need to increase support to the private sector in difficult environments”.
Are these nice words, or are the Government really going to reverse their policy on fragile states?
Save the Children thinks otherwise. It says that of DfID’s aid to low-income countries over the past three years, only 16 per cent went to conflict-affected fragile states. A high proportion of children of primary school age living in these countries do not have access to education—that is, 38 million out of 77 million worldwide. Save the Children calculates that these countries will need $5.8 billion more a year if we are going to meet the MDGs in primary education.
This suggests that the Government, while they express good intentions, are not yet in a position to target some developing countries with new policies on good governance. As the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, mentioned, Angola is an example of a post-conflict country where DfID is actually reducing its funding because of the difficult environment, and it will not therefore be helping the poor or the civil society organisations, which are all crying out for support. Perhaps they will have to wait for another White Paper.
12.54 pm
Lord Lea of Crondall: My Lords, I welcome my noble friend’s initiative. I acknowledge her point about the widespread consultation but I am not quite so enthusiastic about the White Paper. I do not give it
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Meeting the millennium development goals is a question, statistically, of gross national product increases per head in real terms. The White Paper quite widely makes the most elementary undergraduate mistake of confusing overall growth rates of gross domestic product with growth rates per head and so, quite often, one does not know whether the authors intend one or the other. For example, on page 19 it refers to Tanzania growing at 6 per cent per year. The world development indicators of the World Bank since 2000 show that the figure is 1.2 per cent per capita. I would give this series of undergraduate essays strung together as a White Paper a mark of “beta two” individually and “beta minus two” overall. I am putting this slightly provocatively because I think it is necessary to get an economic grip on what the thread of the argument is supposed to be. The White Paper reiterates our commitment to the millennium development goals when, as has been said, there is no chance of meeting them in Africa.
The World Bank research study refers to the dollar-a-day benchmark—which, of course, purely in exchange rate terms, is logically $365 a year—whereas we are using now $700 dollars a year at purchasing power parity. The report states that for Africa and Latin America under the current assumptions, both absolute poverty and poverty incidence cannot be halved within less than 30 years. So, if Bob Geldof thinks differently, he is misleading people quite grossly. With some income redistribution the scenario improves markedly in some parts of the world, but for Africa under the current assumptions, poverty incidence will still take more than 30 years to be halved.
This connects very much to the question of population growth, although it is very hard to see this analysis in the White Paper. A recent analysis by the European Defence Agency was circulated to a meeting of the sub-committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Development Policy of the European Union Committee and was debated recently. It states:
which is pencilled-in in red and orange traffic lights, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford has pointed out; there is, of course, a quite different trend in India and China—
- “growing faster than anywhere else—up by 48% to 1.3 billion by 2025—despite AIDS. The average African’s age is projected to be 22. Desertification may increasingly concentrate this young population in urban centres (11 African mega-cities of 5 million plus by 2025)—many of them without hope of employment. The implications for despair, humanitarian disaster and migratory pressures are obvious”.
I echo the EDA’s analysis that demographic development is very important. Population growth will far exceed what is compatible with increased living standards and meeting the millennium goals. Reducing the offspring rate per woman from five, six or seven to nearer the replacement rate will not happen through some magical virtuous circle of the diminution of the rate of population growth and the rate of growth of the GDP, as I think current DfID
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I ask the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford—perhaps it is a bit undignified to put a question in this form, but I am inclined to put it in some form or other—where is the policy of Christian Aid on population growth? We have now heard that all the Churches have a strong policy on ecology, but surely there must be some more honest analysis coming from Christian Aid and the Churches about population growth. I suspect we all understand some of the reasons why that analysis is not there, but I want to put that challenge in public. The issue should be addressed. It has become something of a taboo, but the appalling conditions, low expectations of life and infant mortality require that challenge to be met.
I have a question for the Minister. I have given notice to her office that I would like her to write to me on this question, as she cannot be expected to swap statistics here and now. The GDP growth rate per head in real terms in Africa means that halving the number of people on less than a dollar a day by 2015 is unattainable, but what figure is implied by that? We cannot see how far we are falling behind unless we know what the figure is. I hope my noble friend will write to me and say what it is, and how DfID is proposing to monitor on a wall chart what the numbers actually are, so that there will be no misunderstanding between us about the statistics.
1.02 pm
Lord Crisp: My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness for initiating this debate on this important subject. I declare two interests. I have been asked by the Prime Minister and the Secretaries of State for International Development and Health to report to them on what more we could be doing to use UK experience and expertise in health to support health improvement in developing countries. I shall be reporting to them in a few weeks’ time. I am also part of the team carrying out the DfID capability review. I do not intend to pre-empt either of those processes in my remarks today. There are, however, many areas covered by this important and wide-ranging White Paper, and I want to speak about three of them: two where I have some experience and know their importance, and one about which I know relatively little, but which I believe could be even more important.
The White Paper rightly addresses the importance of governance within each country. It also discusses the importance of good global governance, as it calls it. I have seen the importance of that all over the developing world. There are too many donors, sometimes with different priorities, and organisations doing different and sometimes conflicting things, making very burdensome demands on countries. There are too many isolated projects, when joining up with others would have greater impact. I suspect we have all heard of those examples of countries being visited 100 times or more in a year by different donors
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This unco-ordinated system means that aid is not being used effectively. It also means that developing countries are faced with unreasonable demands. They have to use precious resources to manage and co-ordinate donors. I have met, and indeed been berated by, Ministers in many African countries, who find their efforts hampered by the complexity of international aid. They have to collect different sets of information for different donors to monitor progress when they should be collecting the information they need to run their own affairs. Monitoring is important, but there needs to be a single discussion, a single process and a single conversation between the donors and the developing countries.
Some donors are beginning to address that, and I applaud the UK Government for their leadership in that respect. More importantly, I have heard Ministers in developing countries do so. They have adopted a country-led approach, give budget support rather than support for individual projects and are working to reform the global architecture. However, the reality on the ground is that the situation is not changing fast enough. What practical steps are the Government taking to accelerate progress here internationally?
My second point is about how the Government are leveraging support in the UK for their policy. That has two elements. There is a statement by the Prime Minister in the preface to the White Paper that this is about a whole government effort. Then there is the description in the last chapter of how we can all contribute as individuals. While I have just argued that development needs to be done professionally, it need not be exclusively an area for development professionals. Noble Lords will know of many examples, some led by Members of your Lordships’ House, of voluntary work carried out by organisations and individuals who are making a real difference in developing countries. There are many examples of government departments other than DfID, not least health and education, where important international work is undertaken.
That work needs to be carried out in some overall framework so we do not see duplication and misguided effort, but at the same time we need to ensure that such co-ordination does not crush initiative and creativity. These voluntary efforts are important, and can build person-to-person contact across the world. They, too, contribute to international development and to “soft” diplomacy. How in practical terms, then, are the Government leveraging and supporting such individual efforts and making sure this is truly a Government-wide and UK-wide approach?
Finally, I turn to finance and the economy. This is an enormous and vital topic. As the White Paper says, growth is the best way to reduce poverty. The lack of capital and investment is one of the greatest problems developing countries face. There is enormous entrepreneurial activity, and scope for much more, in
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I shall touch on the economic subject of micro-credit, an area where I have much less experience than in the others I have mentioned. There is now evidence that giving women small loans for economic purposes, perhaps to buy a sewing machine or some farming tools, leads to improvements in their families’ health, rather than doing anything directly on health. There is also ample evidence, far beyond health, of the central role that supporting women—with education, organisation or loans—has on development in all its aspects. What are the Government doing in practical terms to support this entrepreneurialism, and how much priority will be given to it?
In these few minutes I have spoken of the central importance of improving the top-down aid system and of widening the scope of development to include us all, not just the development professionals, but also of the vital need to support bottom-up development, engaging the entrepreneurialism of the people in developing countries. The White Paper touches on all of them, but it does so necessarily in a broad-brush way. My concern is with the detail and the pace of change. I look forward to the Minister’s response.
1.08 pm
Lord Parekh: My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, for initiating this debate so eloquently. I also congratulate the Government, especially DfID, on producing what I take to be an extremely imaginative and interesting White Paper. If I may part company with what my noble friend Lord Lea of Crondall was saying, it is far more than a collection of undergraduate, or even postgraduate, essays. Having been a university professor for nearly 40 years, I reassure the House that it is far better even than an outstanding PhD dissertation that deserves to be published by the best university press.
I have just two minor criticisms of the report, and I will then get on to the big issues. It would be helpful if pictures in such reports could be identified in future with their country of origin. It would also be helpful if the pictures did not include simply people in destitution or Africans going round being cheerful, but also people in positions of power, doctors at hospitals, and universities. Africa is not just one sad story of failure and underachievement.
I want to highlight four or five important issues. Some of them were covered in the report while others were, sadly, ignored. The first and most important to
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We should be encouraging those countries to create plural and multi-ethnic political structures, sharing power with federal units at not only the political but the economic and cultural levels. Here, I am afraid that our foreign policy gets in the way. It is sad that the report has no reference at all to how foreign policy can complicate situations. Unfortunately, for the last three or four years the American Government in particular—with some support, sadly, from our own—have been heavily preoccupied with Islamic terrorism. That has generated suspicion of any attempt in developing countries to accommodate religious groups. In fact, there is constant pressure not to accommodate such groups but to keep them out as much as possible, with the result that many developing countries seem to think that they will enjoy high marks in the western press and from western Governments the more religious people that they kill, hunt or arrest. Every day we hear stories of Governments doing precisely that, and expecting the American Government to cheer them and pat them on the back.
As a result, we have large numbers of religious groups mistakenly taken to be terrorists or fundamentalists who sulk and feel alienated, feeling that there is no place for them in the country. Equally importantly, mullahs and religious hierarchies have their own economic interests, which good political sense would seem to require that we should be able to accommodate. One of my most important points is therefore that the war on terrorism, by equating all Islamic religious groups with terrorists and putting pressure on developing countries not to accommodate them in any way, is a disastrous attempt to secure economic development in any form.
By and large, our concern should be to leave these countries alone to resolve their conflicts and to enable political settlements through their societies’ normal processes of negotiation. Of course, they are sometimes stretched beyond the limits of their resources, in which case our concern should be to hold the ring, and encourage negotiations but not try to impose this or that individual or group. Such Governments do not last; the alienated groups then turn to warlords, and things become disastrous.
My second point—it has already been made by the noble Lords, Lord Hannay of Chiswick and Lord Garden—is about having a tighter regime of control on the activities not only of our public enterprises but of multinationals. It is known that several multinationals have been funding militias. They play one local group
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Thirdly, just as we acted firmly and quickly to monitor the bank accounts and financial dealings of groups suspected of supporting terrorists, we must do the same with government leaders of developing countries. They should not be allowed to siphon off large sums of money abroad. There must be tight control on how the bank transactions take place, and those suspected of such things should not be allowed to find shelter in our country, or in any other western society. Nor should their families be educated in any of our schools and universities with money obtained in that way.
Lastly, I turn to the question of aid. It is vital to building up the economic capacities of developing countries, but it is true that it can be appropriated by the rich and powerful and may not reach its intended audience. I therefore suggest that we might bear three or four things in mind. First of all, aid should be clearly targeted at specific programmes—mainly education, health and the training of managers. Secondly, as far as possible we should be working with local NGOs that have some experience of working on the ground. Thirdly, as has already been said, we ought to be able to set up and work through local networks of Grameen-like banks—the kind for which Professor Yunus was recently awarded the Nobel prize—in a suitably Africanised form. In Bangladesh it has run into difficulties, which I would not want to go into. It cannot be tried out in the same way in India or in many of the Middle Eastern countries, so the idea of a local bank lending money to women and encouraging them to set up their own small enterprises has to be suitably indigenised.
As far as possible, rather than aid being privatised—as the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, suggested—we ought to be thinking in terms of fostering civil society and encouraging it to take on the burden. For example, schools in our country can link up with schools in African countries. Hospitals, universities and institutes of management could be doing the same thing so that, over time, we begin to build up technical resources in developing countries. Once money goes into developing technical resources, we need not worry too much about corrupt Governments, because when people are suitably trained corrupt Governments are able to do little about this. We ought to be relying more heavily within our own country on institutions, universities, schools and others. We should give money to them and encourage them to link up with their counterparts to build them up.
1.17 pm
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