Official Development Assistance

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 15th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I put my toe rather delicately into this overseas aid pool; it is not one that I usually go to. I do this primarily to give a little commercial for an organisation that I am a trustee of, the Atlas Foundation, a rugby-based charity with a worldwide reach, using rugby as a development tool. I will try to point out how this fits in with some of the wider aspects of the debate, and will make one big ask of the Government at the end that is not directly related to funding.

A sports-based project dealing generally with children is not unknown to people. If you get a gathering of children, usually from poorer backgrounds, and you say here is a sport structure—in this case an egg-shaped ball—and you get them to run around, you will get an easy buy-in. But what keeps them turning up, and often gets them more involved, is feeding programmes. You have people from poor backgrounds getting a structure, role models and feeding, and then we encourage them to go into education. There are so many variations because, although we never intended to be, we are worldwide. It is a fairly safe pattern. Many people from other organisations will have similar objectives. The arts has done it on several occasions, along with other sectors.

I emphasise that this is on the micro level, not the macro level, as my noble friend Lord Bruce talked about at the start. You are helping people to get education, confidence and good role models to survive in the world that they are in, and maybe to make small changes later on. This is not a big driver of change at the moment, not in the way that government funding can be, but by doing this you are making sure that people can get involved.

When I was sitting down and looking through our reports, worrying about how we are going to raise the money for next year and feeling quite pleased with the work that had been done in the past, something caught my eye which I do not think the rest of the board had realised. We get a much better bang for our buck out of the girls. It is with the girls where you really get the improvement. We get lower birth rates from the girls involved. We found from one of our projects in Memphis, Tennessee, that the attitudes of the boys involved towards girls were much better; they regarded them as equals, friends and people on the same terms.

When I looked around more, I found that this was a universal theme. In Kibera, in Kenya, and in Langa, in South Africa, the same things were occurring. The project that says it best is the Khelo project in West Bengal. Here we have managed to get not only lower birth rates but lower child marriage coming through, something that was not looked for down there. High school graduation has gone from 18% to 80%, ensuring that many families have a foundation in their mother—and it is the mother; the male of the species has a bit of catching-up to do.

This is from a sports-based charity. Of late, rugby union has proved itself not to have a male-dominated attitude, but a few years ago many would have looked at me and asked, “Really, you are doing that?” If we encourage girls and women to get involved in sport—I think rugby is the best one but others will disagree—then we will get a good bang for our buck.

What do I want from the Government? I would like more money, but that is a universal theme. A 30% cut will take some clawing back over time. I would like better advice for small charities on how to operate abroad. We have had our successes, but one big success almost became a disaster for us. Atlas has a lovely project, created in Kenya; a mobile classroom with computers on board, and we call it the DigiBus. It is a rugby-based charity and Covid rather scuppered it initially, but what if we take it to South Africa for the Lions tour and it gets damaged in transit? Who do we speak to? How do we replace it? What is the insurance regime? What are the regulatory regimes between Kenya and South Africa? We could give lectures on that now, because we have got the experience. We can also show the bills and the delays.

Will the Government ensure that there is better advice available for those of us in the smaller charity sector who operate around the world? We deal with children, but we do not find out whether there is a universal approach to childcare in these environments. How will we do it? We cannot deliver successfully if we do not get support. I remember once asking some advice from the Foreign Office a few years ago. I was told to telephone somebody in Northern Ireland. After three hours of chasing, I was back to the desk next to them, and they still did not have an answer. We do not know. We are prepared to do our little bit, but we need more guidance.

Referring back to the support for women and girls in the Khelo project, another organisation called SKRUM—it is pronounced “scrum” but spelled differently, but do not ask a dyslexic to describe the difference—helps to get sanitary products to the girls. We talk about period poverty over here but period phobia is very real for some of these groups. We can give examples, if you will let us tell the rest of the world. Word of mouth will do some of it, but if the Government says that they have examples of what not to do, then we are prepared to help. But we need help as well. Unless the Government can take on this small thing, using their embassies and consulates, they will waste the efforts of their own charity sector, to a greater or lesser degree, and make life more difficult.

These are small organisations keeping their staff down and being run by volunteers. If you want to keep repeating mistakes, then carry on keeping these people in ignorance. The Government have the capacity to do something about this. Please can they give us some idea of when they will start?