Queen’s Speech

Lord Chidgey Excerpts

Thursday 17th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Chidgey]

My Lords, in my contribution I should like to concentrate on developments in the international aid sector.

For some years now, there have been extensive efforts across the aid and development sector and the recipient community to develop monitoring and assessment techniques and evaluation procedures to measure and gauge aid and development effectiveness—be it in the African Sahel, the impoverished plains of the Indian desert or in the infant classroom of a Chinese village school, or whether it be for the relief of famine, combating disease or for providing education, skills or training.

The pursuit of an effective and accepted global system of aid and development monitoring has proved as exhaustive as the outcomes have been elusive. Through a series of international fora, initially with the Paris agreement and then with the Accra agenda—it sounds rather like a quiz show—international agreement has finally, some 10 years later, been reached at the fourth high-level forum in Busan, in the Busan Partnership. All the international governmental delegations have signed up, even China—thanks in no small part, it has to be said, to the determination and persuasive talents of Andrew Mitchell, our Secretary of State for International Development. All the major charities—for example, the Global Fund, the Gates Foundation, the World Bank and many more—have signed up. The post-Busan interim group now meets in Paris at the OECD under the chairmanship of Rwanda and the United Kingdom. It has agreed on seven themes that should guide the selection of global indicators for the monitoring of the Busan commitments—the set of indicators which will monitor the progress on the prioritised themes. The proposed set of indicators brings together: first, indicators that are measured through country-level progress; secondly, indicators that are global in nature or draw on existing global data; and thirdly, indicators that do not require data collection at the country level or aggregation to inform global monitoring.

Given the intense pressure and often ill-informed criticism to which aid and aid projects can be subjected, an objective, quantifiable and measurable international methodology for monitoring effective development co-operation is essential. There is, however, one extremely important component missing from this formula—the one component which, I would argue, has the strongest interest in measuring the effectiveness of an aid programme, in measuring its cost-effectiveness and value for money and in deciding whether the programme or project really does meet needs of the community it is designed to serve. That component is clearly the people themselves or their elected representatives. Yet there is hardly a mention of parliaments, enhancing parliamentary capacity or strengthening parliamentary capability to better monitor and hold to account the activities of national and regional governments who direct these aid programmes.

I suggest that one way of making sure that aid does indeed work is to allow the recipients to take ownership of the aid programmes—which are, after all, theirs—by ensuring that their citizens can acquire the skills and talents they need to drive forward their economies, drive their communities out of poverty and break the dependency in conflict-affected and fragile states which historically had more than 40% of the land under fertile agriculture but in which the figure has now fallen to around 10%, with 40% of the population being dependent on food aid.

Parliamentarians were represented at the Busan forum, albeit in small numbers, including just a handful from development recipient parliaments in southern and central Africa and representatives from the International Parliamentary Union and AWEPA in Europe—perhaps three dozen in all. The international governmental delegations, aid organisations, lobby groups, functionaries and so forth, I am told, numbered several thousand, which confirms just how little sensitivity, involvement or awareness the aid community seems to have of the communities that it ultimately serves.

Reporting back to the final plenary session at Busan on behalf of the parliamentary forum, I and others called for donors to support a parliamentary platform on aid and development effectiveness that engaged donor and partner countries’ MPs. They should engage in a dialogue on knowledge and experience for joint monitoring, mutual peer learning, risk assessment and management, and policy coherence. We also called for all stakeholders to recognise that effective institutions and policies must start with the separation of powers in order to prevent abuse. We believe that this is essential. We called for Parliament to provide the meeting point for civil society, the private sector and local government on issues as diverse as climate change mitigation and combating corruption.

That leads me to the closing part of my contribution. Much is made of the proportion of our wealth that we allocate to aid, and of the decision to raise it in this country to 0.7% of GNI by 2013. That has been an international target since, I think, 1970. I appreciate that, 40 years on, that is something to be aspired to by many countries. Of course, the actual cash that we are passing over these days is somewhat less than it would have been a few years ago, given the fall in our GNI. People should remember that 0.7% is not a static figure. I want to put this in perspective and compare it with the potential wealth of some of the developing countries that we are aiding.

The DRC is estimated to possess mineral assets of precious metals worth in excess of $24 trillion. Yet in the UNDP’s Human Development Index last year, the DRC was again listed as 187th out of 187. It is estimated that less than 5% of the real value of the minerals exported from mines in the DRC finds its way to the state treasury; the rest disappears through a network of shelf and offshore companies registered in zero corporation tax havens such as, but not limited to, the BVI.

I am running out of time but a similar situation, but on an even greater scale, exists in Zimbabwe with the Marange diamond fields. Surely we should start to take seriously the naked international theft and corruption on an industrial scale which takes place in these fabulously wealthy countries, whose citizens are left in poverty.