Poverty in the Developing World

Lord Bishop of Gloucester Excerpts

Thursday 28th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Gloucester]

My Lords, over the past decade encouraging gains have been achieved against the targets of the millennium development goals. Yet, is it not unacceptable that 9 million children still die each year before they reach their fifth birthday? In sub-Saharan Africa, this represents the death of one in seven children under five. It is equally unacceptable that more than 350,000 women should die each year from complications during pregnancy or childbirth, 99 per cent of them in the developing countries.

Despite seeing recent gains across the world on many indicators of economic development and human well-being, the extreme poor remain trapped in poverty in the least developed countries. Many of these countries have been caught in decades-long poverty traps often marked by a high incidence of conflict and weak national institutions, and hindered by inequitable global economic structures. Concerted national action and better targeted global development assistance are needed to prevent these least developed countries from becoming increasingly marginalised, their populations struggling under extreme poverty.

I am grateful to the Government for ring-fencing the aid budget, especially in the current economic climate. This decision reflects the continuing commitment of the British people to assist the world's poorest and affirms the United Kingdom as an example within the international community. I believe that churches and other faith communities with deep convictions and roots in poorer communities around the world will continue to uphold and monitor the Government's decision on the aid budget, even as other funding pressures are faced at home. I urge the Government also to encourage other EU and G20 Governments to uphold their commitments to the world's poorest, who inevitably have been most acutely affected by the global financial crisis.

I welcome DfID’s recent review of UK aid, Changing Lives, Delivering Results. DfID’s commitment to focus aid on the poorest—and on achieving tangible and measurable results in addressing both the root causes and symptoms of poverty—is surely right, as is its focus on women, who are disproportionately affected by poverty. The wisdom of that policy has already been mentioned this morning. Important progress has been made in recent years on economic development and the United Kingdom has played a major role in this. However, this means that the world’s poorest billion people remain faced by more intractable and entrenched barriers to escaping poverty. It is therefore important that aid is well targeted and directed at the poorest countries.

Some of those poorest countries may, unlike Pakistan and Afghanistan, have little strategic importance to the United Kingdom, but nevertheless have a reasonable environment in which to absorb aid and achieve results in lifting more of the extreme poor out of poverty. Some of these poorest countries have never been aid recipients. Others have lost their United Kingdom aid programmes as a result of the recent DfID review, including, as we have heard, Burundi—which has recently emerged from conflict and needs to secure stability through a peace dividend—Angola, Niger and Lesotho. I urge DfID to make significant, alternative funding paths accessible to these countries and to consider their re-inclusion in the UK's aid programme, as they share many of the challenges that DfID has identified as priorities.

I would like to say something on the role of faith-based entities working with the extreme poor. Most UK aid flows from Government to Government but the reality is that non-state providers, including NGOs and faith communities, are often the most closely involved in the well-being of the poorest people and are to be found where government cannot reach. This is especially true in many fragile and conflict-affected states, where their Government’s service provision has broken down while faith communities continue to provide health and education services. DfID has recognised this fact in some contexts; for example, by supporting education provision by the Episcopal Church of Sudan and health and HIV work by the Anglican Church in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Changes in funding mechanisms are necessary to ensure wider access for faith-based entities to become partners with Governments in working to overcome poverty. Christian schools in the developing world, as I have seen in India and Tanzania, also have a particular role to play in the education of girls and equal access for all. As shown in Sudan, faith schools in developing countries can provide education at low unit cost, building on community-based school management.

The international development community needs to recognise the importance of people's faith and its values of service to others as a motivating factor in social development. Some local faith-based initiatives in Kenya have seen massive mobilisation for local communities to lift themselves out of poverty, in one case mobilising 10,000 people to unite in funding and constructing an irrigation project, while in another case over 800 farmers united to form a dairy co-operative. These initiatives were motivated by faith values and developed without external aid. It is important that DfID and other donors recognise the role and contribution of faith communities in development and promote more effective and accessible forms of partnership with these entities.

From the faith communities’ side, more work is needed to strengthen the capacity and co-ordination of their programmes. One such global initiative is the newly formed Anglican Alliance for Development, Relief and Advocacy, which brings together Anglican churches and agencies across the world to build capacity and co-ordinate responses. I was grateful that the Secretary of State for International Development announced at the General Synod of the Church of England in February that DfID would seek to strengthen ways of working with faith communities. I also welcome DfID’s moves to establish a working group to help develop a set of practical partnership principles for development agencies working with those communities. It is to be hoped that this process will quickly achieve renewed and strengthened support for and collaboration with faith communities and faith-based organisations in lifting people out of extreme poverty. It is encouraging to note that the Economic Affairs Committee of your Lordships’ House will shortly begin an inquiry into the economics of development aid.

In conclusion, while commending the Government’s commitment to maintaining and increasing the United Kingdom aid programme, I urge the Government to revisit their decision on closing aid programmes in some of the world's poorest countries and to continue to explore ways of achieving greater impact on the lives of the extreme poor through more extensive and effective partnerships with faith-based entities and other civil society actors. The UK should be proud of its work in international development. Together we can tackle global structural barriers to overcoming poverty while working with the poorest countries and peoples—with their Governments, civil societies, faith communities and private sectors—to achieve transformation in lifting millions more people out of extreme poverty.