Overseas Aid

Baroness Chalker of Wallasey Excerpts

Wednesday 30th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

I absolutely agree with that. The noble Baroness pointed to the proud record of the Liberal Democrats in actually providing the legislation. I remind her that a Conservative Chancellor is currently delivering on that pledge, giving £14 billion a year to the poorest in this world.

[Baroness Chalker of Wallasey (Con)]

My Lords, will the Minister be ardent in his pursuit of match funding, particularly for health projects, which will valuably use up at least 0.7% of the GNI? There are many countries without the basic GP facilities that we all take for granted, let alone equipment for their health services. We could do far more using training and second-hand equipment from this country as part of the 0.7% spending on those who are the poorest.

[Lord Bates]

I pay tribute to the work of my noble friend as Overseas Development Minister some time ago, before that commitment was met. She is right: health is absolutely central. We need to work in partnership, and that is the reason why we work with the World Health Organization, the Gavi alliance and the Global Fund in doing precisely that work.

Brexit: Least Developed Countries

Baroness Chalker of Wallasey Excerpts

Thursday 16th November 2017 Grand Committee

[Baroness Chalker of Wallasey (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Earl for tabling this important debate. I endorse practically every word he said. I shall refer briefly to the EU work in the Sahel. It is no good leaving that critical work uninfluenced by British foreign policy. This issue is not often debated in this House or another place and I hope that DfID will look with great care at what we can do to continue to support the work that the EU is currently doing in the Sahel.

I declare my interests as listed in the Register of Lords’ Interests. As colleagues know, I continue to be involved in matters in Africa—more so on the finance, trade and business side than on development. I too have always believed that the best way to help African countries, and indeed those LDCs in the rest of the world, is to help them into business, production and employment rather than give them handouts. I of course support the work that goes on in health, education and many other areas, but I believe it is critical to include the work on economic development. That is why I was glad to read the previous Secretary of State’s commitment on 24 June this year to help the world’s poorest by securing existing duty-free access to UK markets, as well as providing new opportunities to increase trade links. This will apply to the 48 countries that continue to benefit from duty-free exports to the UK on all goods, other than arms and ammunition.

It is worth reading DfID’s Economic Development Strategy. More than £20 billion-worth of goods per annum is shipped from these countries to the UK and, with that strategy, outlined by DfID earlier this year, that sum should increase steadily provided that the funding arrangements for training and business development in the LDCs continue. That has to underpin the national programmes for skills development, in which the EU—and other member states in the EU—have been much involved. They continue to help one another in this respect.

The serious co-ordination of cross-country assistance to the LDCs has to extend beyond Britain’s boundaries and we have to maximise the improving use of development assistance. I know that the UK has been a very positive contributor to the better use of funds with many of our development partners, and this needs to continue beyond March 2019. I hope that the new Secretary of State, Penny Mordaunt, will continue Priti Patel’s important focus on job-creating growth in our own development programmes, regardless of who originated the programmes. With a very much better budget than I ever enjoyed as the Minister for Development, it may be possible for us to put money into programmes paralleling those in the EU when we are no longer a member. Economic development and the training and skills from which so many LDCs benefit at present have to be protected if we are to be honest with ourselves in relation to what development is about. Thus, I urge colleagues to see that we continue the good things in the EU development programme beyond March 2019.

We also need to make sure that this sad departure of the UK from the EU will not be used as an excuse not to do things. I hear far too many pretty ignorant comments about what we will not do in the future. One thing that we will be doing is good development assistance. I am very glad to learn that Rory Stewart, who is a Minister for both the Foreign Office and DfID—something that I enjoyed on the Africa score for many years—has just set up a special review of development assistance in the event of our exit, which seems likely. I hope that this debate will be able to contribute to Foreign Office and DfID thinking on the changed situation that we will face.

I should like to say one word on Mozambique. It desperately needs our help. It is trying to find a way out of its debt situation but it is in some considerable difficulty. I hope that Britain will be able to help.

Neglected Tropical Diseases

Baroness Chalker of Wallasey Excerpts

Monday 3rd April 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chalker of Wallasey (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Hayman on what she said at the commencement of this special debate. I endorse everything she said 100%. We have had many battles in the past but on this issue we agree completely. I have many interests in this field but I want to focus mainly, as a long-term supporter and as a patron of WaterAid, on the critical role of water and sanitation in helping to defeat NTDs.

First, I pay tribute to Barbara Frost, the chief executive of WaterAid, who is to retire in the coming months after more than 10 notable years as its head. Much of what has come into the WASH programme and into other considerations, could not have occurred but for her leadership and her team’s work and we should put on record our thanks to her. She has been totally relentless in what she has done to get increased action to supply clean water and basic sanitation, not just through our own department’s programme, which has been notable, but also in other countries’ programmes which were not as well led as the water and sanitation programmes led by DfID in this country.

One question I want to ask my noble friend is whether the Ross fund can be extended to some of the further work that needs to be done to get better water engineering, which is essential to the supply of clean water. It seems to me that we know what needs to be done, but the resources are very often at the end of the pipe, rather than at the beginning of the process. I believe that we should be paying more attention to this.

There is one further area of work that I hope DfID will undertake. We are doing very well indeed, with the help of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, where I was proud to be the chairman for eight years, and the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, where I was on the council. But we are not doing enough on basic health training for doctors in countries where the NTDs are still thriving. We need to focus, with the royal colleges, on better training in-country for the doctors of the countries that suffer the NTDs. We are doing insufficient work in that field. Much as we try, it is certainly not reaching many of the doctors who are practising, when it is accepted knowledge in this country and many other developed countries.

I do not wish to repeat what the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, or anyone else in the debate said, but I believe that we should have not just an annual repeat of our efforts but more frequent debates on these vital subjects. Healthy societies in the developing world help the education of the young in the developing world. They cannot have those healthy societies if they continue to have the amount of illness caused by NTDs and, indeed, dirty water. I hope my noble friend will be able to give us some hope of more activity.

International Development Policies

Baroness Chalker of Wallasey Excerpts

Thursday 19th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chalker of Wallasey (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, for initiating this debate. I fully endorse all of his contribution on ICAI. I shall not repeat it. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Barker of Battle, on his maiden speech. We look forward to his future contributions. I should perhaps declare my interest as president of the Chalker Foundation for Africa, but that gives me no money. I give it money, so that is how we proceed.

In this debate, the issues to be addressed to make Britain’s efforts more efficient and effective cover a wide range. I hope that the reviews now under way in DfID, of which there are many, will be published in full when they are concluded. I shall mention two specific matters where there may be possible benefits from a change in current DfID practices. Before I come to those issues, I pay tribute to the recent work of CDC. The Harvard Business School working party evaluation of its impact on four measures of business success—employment, revenues, profits and taxes paid—shows clearly that fund investing has allowed CDC to reach a broader range of businesses, especially small business, in the developing world in a wider range of geographies than it could have done on its own. By allowing CDC to build local capacity through supporting first-time teams, several funds have gone on to raise successor funds and create successful track records in the developing world by attracting commercial capital into those emerging markets. That is vital. Will my noble friend confirm that DfID will do all it can to continue and enhance fund investing through CDC and others, especially in power generation and infrastructure projects?

A further word on infrastructure: Britain has the best professional engineering fraternity in the world. I hope that DfID will use its budget and its positive energy to re-establish engineering advisers from the private sector to plan and oversee the urgently needed projects in productive infrastructure growth.

Can the Minister reassure me that worthwhile projects for development put to DfID for funding of values of less than £50 million will be seriously considered and funded if they meet the return criteria on which they should be judged? Perhaps she could publish the exact criteria by which her department judges these projects, for I hear that many smaller projects worth less than that amount are not now acceptable to the department.

My other point concerns the other end of the financial scale. As patron of Wulugu, a small local charity working in Ghana building schools, especially for girl children, I am concerned to find that it and many other small charities like it are not given support to increase the education of girl children. It is also now helping mothers who never had the chance to learn to read or write. Build Africa is another example of similar good school-building work in east Africa. It is by funding small local charities that we gain innumerable benefits for training volunteers. Large worthwhile charities can raise their own money, but the smaller ones have enormous problems not only in raising the money but in getting the sort of support on the ground that I believe DfID should be giving. I thank your Lordships for listening to my points about large and really small beneficiaries of DfID funds.

International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Baroness Chalker of Wallasey Excerpts

Friday 23rd January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chalker of Wallasey (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to debate this Bill, albeit that I am able to make only a short contribution when there is so much to be said. I very much welcome the noble Lord, Lord Fox, who will be making his maiden speech today, and I hope that he will join in our debates on this subject a great deal in the future.

As colleagues will know, it is almost 18 years since I completed my nearly eight years as the Minister for Overseas Development—that was the title in those days. In the last of those years, our spending on overseas development reached just 0.26% of GNI. There are many in this House now, as there have been in the past, who heard my pleas that we could do so much more if we had a little more money. In those days, 0.7% was an aim but it was very far off the reality. We turned down far too many good projects because we had to cut our coat according to the then available cloth. We also discouraged too many people from becoming involved, which, to me, was almost a sin. We were unable to fulfil many deeply needed programmes across the world, but we did our best.

Following my role in government, I went on to do some part-time work for the World Bank as I set up my own consultancy. Africa Matters Ltd is not involved in the NGO sector, except in the donations that we make, but we are very involved in encouraging investment in worthwhile projects in Africa. That investment can be from anywhere, provided it is honest and open. There have been real improvements in the manner in which the richer countries of the world have worked with Governments to develop skills, institutions and democratic management, but there is still a long way to go, as many of the reports which will be referred to in this debate will undoubtedly mention. The millennium development goals have been a real spur to improvements, and most of the international and national bodies have raised their game. We can see the results, to which many have already referred.

It is in the light of the great changes that have taken place that I have thought long and hard about whether or not the UK Parliament should make the 0.7% target a legal requirement of public spending. Yes, most of the developing countries are gradually improving their economies and their business sectors. Some, such as India, will no longer have assistance, as they can afford to give aid to those parts of their country which lag far, far behind the good-news stories that we occasionally hear. It is quite clear that the UK is giving a higher proportion of its bilateral aid to low-income countries than most other bilateral DAC donors.

My daily work is telling me that there is much more to do, especially in the Commonwealth, to help to build up business and social institutions so that the money being raised is properly spent. I say this as a supporter of the African Corporate Governance Network and many other institutions, such as Transparency International, which, when I was a Minister all those years ago, I was proud to assist in getting started. However, there are areas such as education provision across the developing world that must have our help, even though the improvements contributed to by UK aid have seen in the last three years more than 10.2 million more children, including 4.9 million more girls, go to primary and lower secondary schools. Starting at the very bottom with education and healthcare makes an enormous difference 10, 15 or 20 years on to the ability of those young people to be involved in business and to create their own economic future. Therefore, it is in education, clean water, sanitation and healthcare improvements, as well in as institution building, that DfID is now so much more involved. I believe that the £11.6 million donation helped many organisations to get access to financial services, and this has been another of the critical steps forward which DfID has gradually been able to take in the last few years.

Time does not allow me to go into all of this. I have considered very carefully whether it is right to put this target into law. However, from all my work in corporate social guidance and other development areas of business, I know that there is a real feeling that Britain, which is leading the way, must have the money to do this. As the mover of the Second Reading, the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, said, it is critical that people know from year to year how they are going to be able to finance projects. One of our great nightmares was that we never knew how much we were going to have.

On balance, I welcome the Bill wholeheartedly and I hope that the House will give it a Second Reading.

Women: Board Membership

Baroness Chalker of Wallasey Excerpts

Monday 10th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Northover]

We are aiming for women to account for 50% of new public appointments by 2015. They are currently averaging 45%, so we are moving in the right direction. The noble Baroness is quite right that we need to address this at every level. One of the beneficial things about the Davies approach to company boards is that it is also having an effect on the response of companies at other levels. This issue has to be addressed at every level.

[Baroness Chalker of Wallasey (Con)]

Is my noble friend aware that the Institute of Directors and many other professional bodies could also contribute in this regard by mentoring some of their women members? They may not be as numerous even as 25%, but there are some excellent engineers, accountants and lawyers and so on who could, with assistance, be very good members of boards and, indeed, members of those professional organisations.

[Baroness Northover]

My noble friend is absolutely right. I do not think that there is a dearth of talent; it is a matter of making sure that those people end up on boards. There is a lot that we ourselves can do. As I did in the debate on International Women’s Day last Thursday, I should like to mention the two companies in the FTSE 100 that have not yet appointed women. Last year, there were five; significantly, two dropped out of the FTSE 100 and one of them—the one that I mentioned—has now appointed a woman. There are two left: Glencore Xstrata and Antofagasta. Perhaps I may point out that Glencore was speedy enough to seek help from the United Kingdom Government when it was trying to finalise a deal overseas. I quote from it:

“We seek to apply best practice, ensuring that our approach is up-to-date and relevant”.

Hmm. I come to Antofagasta, which is Chilean based. Tomorrow, Chile swears in as its new president Michelle Bachelet, the formidable former head of UN Women, so I think that we have a pincer movement here.

Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria

Baroness Chalker of Wallasey Excerpts

Tuesday 4th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chalker of Wallasey]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak in this debate, which was initiated by my noble friend Lord Fowler. I, too, commend him on his energy, commitment and his determination to keep HIV/AIDS and other diseases at the forefront of debate and always to remind my old department, now DfID, that it has to keep up to the mark. As noble Lords will know, my interest in the health of people in the developing world has gone on for a very long while. I spent more than 10 years at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, six years chairing the Medicines for Malaria Venture and eight years chairing the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, so I have particular interests.

I hope that we can hear from the Minister and the department a strong pledge to the global fund, which is already operating in 151 countries. I also ask the department to look hard at what more can be done to enhance the training of rural health workers, particularly in prevention. The Touch Foundation, at the moment only in America, works in Tanzania, supported also by the Vitol Foundation in this country. The work to prevent disease and to get early diagnosis has meant a much better use of the resources that we get from the global fund. We can be very grateful to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for the $650 million that it has given since 2002, and it has now given a promissory note for another $750 million. However, we can make the money work only if we have people on the ground to communicate with those who do not understand why these diseases develop so strongly.

In the new funding model of the global fund we have a real opportunity. I understand that it is to be piloted in nine countries, which have not yet been disclosed. It will try to get a greater alignment with country schedules and their priorities and to focus on the countries with the highest disease burden and lowest ability to pay. It will make it simpler for the implementers and the global fund, will mean greater predictability of process and financing and will have a real ability to elicit full expressions of demand and to reward ambition. The global fund can do that. However, the new funding model will work only, first, if it is financed, and secondly, if there is a translation of what you can do with the money through the people on the ground. That is why I make an additional plea to the department that it should consider those organisations that can help in prevention and, particularly, in early diagnosis.

My main interest is clearly in malaria and in trying to beat the mosquito in spreading falciparum and vivax. However, we can have success with new drugs only if those on the ground know when, how and in what quantities to apply them, as well as using the nets that for so long the global fund has provided. I therefore ask the Minister two things. First, that we have early notification from the department of what it can give to the global fund but, secondly, that we now focus a lot more on local-level training, maybe through non-governmental organisations such as the Touch Foundation and other good organisations such as AMREF—I can mention many others, but I will not go on. It is no good just putting the money in unless we motivate the people to do the right things.