International Aid Reviews: Conclusions

Lord Boateng Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Verma]

I thank the noble Lord for all his comments. In fact there was very little that I could disagree with. As he is very well aware through his own experience, building good partnerships is very important. He is absolutely right; we will be working with China and Brazil and, hopefully not too far into the future, with India, too. We are having very constructive conversations with our other partners who provide donor aid. Many have shown a very keen interest in how we have gone through our review process and are looking very closely at what we have managed to do to ensure that their programmes are also going to be targeted and focused so that we all work toward the same end, which is getting people out of poverty.

[Lord Boateng]

My Lords, there is much to be welcomed in the outcome of this review, not least the new-found emphasis on agriculture, food production and wealth creation. Does the Minister recognise that there will be widespread concern in southern Africa, in particular, at the decision to end the bilateral programme in Lesotho, a small state that has been fragile in the past, and Angola, which is conflict ridden and has many millions of people who continue to live in grinding poverty?

Will the Minister assure the House that these two countries in particular will be the subject of concerted effort to improve donor co-ordination, particularly from the multilateral organisations that we fund, and will also be the beneficiaries of the southern African regional programme, within which region Angola and Lesotho quite clearly fall? Will she assure us that resources to that regional programme will be enhanced and will be delivered to those two countries?

[Baroness Verma]

The noble Lord maybe missed the part of the speech that said that the Secretary of State has committed to supporting regional programmes. As he absolutely rightly points out, some of the smaller countries will have greater responses from their regional areas than from bilateral programmes, which are smaller and less able to reach widely. We support the regional programmes very much.

I come back to the point about Burundi and Lesotho, which I keep pronouncing wrongly. We believe that they have comparative partners that are far better placed than us to deliver aid. Therefore, we will help them through the regional programmes.

In response to the noble Baroness, Lady Kinnock, I should say that our regional integration work, which is managed by TradeMark East Africa, which has an established office in Bujumbura, will provide support for Angola and Burundi, so that is covered well. We will not just leave them out there and we are not suddenly going to stop—the process will phase down by 2016.

The noble Lord is absolutely right that we have a keen focus on agriculture, which is really important for food security, not only for that area but for us, too. We have pledged from 2009, when the Opposition were in government, £1.1 billion over three years. We are therefore taking agriculture sustainability very seriously. We are committed to food security and agriculture and are working with the FAO as well as other multilaterals, including the International Fund for Agricultural Development and the World Food Programme, to ensure that we have a strong programme in place.