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.