Millennium Development Goals

Baroness O'Loan Excerpts

Thursday 7th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness O'Loan]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a trustee of Concern and as a special envoy for conflict resolution for the Government of Ireland.

Before I start, I must take exception to some of the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Flather. Her description of the Catholic Church, to which I belong, is inaccurate and offensive. I do not have time in this debate to deal with the issues at length, but I must register that fact.

We are all familiar with the millennium development goals and the targets and indicators and we can, through those indicators, measure the extent of the achievement of the goals. There can be no doubt that some of the targets are very crude and questions may be asked about the validity of some of the statistics being presented as evidence of achievement. One can question, for example, the validity of a target that measures children’s enrolment at primary school but not their completion of primary school; or the target that measures a woman’s access to one session of antenatal care before pregnancy as being antenatal care in pregnancy. Notwithstanding this, much has undoubtedly been achieved through the focus created by the MDGs.

It has been commented today that some developed countries use the financial crisis as an excuse to pull out of or default on aid commitments. The commitment of the coalition Government to maintain the UK’s aid commitments is to be welcomed. I also welcome the fact that the coalition Government’s agreement develops the previous Government’s proposed new global development action plan by prioritising sanitation, a target for which there is a very high failure rate. Without sanitation, the achievement of all the other goals is profoundly more difficult. I also welcome the statement that the Government will recognise the vital role of women in development and will promote gender equality and focus on the rights of women, children and people with disabilities to access services.

At times of such economic difficulty, we will be challenged to remain faithful to our commitment to the MDGs. Inevitably, the amount of money dedicated to aid in this country will decrease, because it is assessed by reference to a percentage of gross national income. There will be less money in the next five years for those who are in need. It is therefore vital that aid is incisively targeted, with measurable and specific outcomes and real accountability.

It is profoundly important that, in the process of seeking to achieve these goals, donor countries do all they can to ensure that their contributions are underpinned by two significant objectives. The first of these is ensuring that, in so far as is possible, development aid is used in the context of capacity-building in the host country. It is laudable for donors to build schools and hospitals using imported labour, or even prisoner labour. The consequence of such strategies, however, is that there is no development of local capacity that will enable the host country to build in the future. The partnership of imported labour and local labour is a fundamental necessity, even where the consequence may be to delay the completion of the project. I therefore ask the Government to ensure that aid is linked to capacity-building at a local level as it is delivered.

The second significant objective that should underpin development aid focused on the achievement of the MDGs is that there should be ongoing risk analysis to ensure that the strategies adopted are buttressed by adequate provision for security and do not add to or create conflict. Many of the countries seeking to achieve the targets inherent in the MDGs are either emerging from conflict or still engaged to some degree in it. At present, some 42 million people are displaced either internally or as refugees. In the granting of aid, do the Government assess the risk of conflict consequential upon it? Is there a requirement for an early warning/early response system to deal with such conflict locally?

Women continue to be disproportionately represented among the uneducated, the unemployed and those in marginal employment. It is fundamentally important and necessary that, in countries that are emerging from conflict and that are the subject of UK donor aid, there is a clear link between the UK strategy to achieve the MDGs and the obligations placed on the country by UN Security Council resolutions.