Poverty in the Developing World

Lord Chidgey Excerpts

Thursday 28th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Chidgey]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, on securing this debate this afternoon and giving us the opportunity to debate these very relevant and important issues. I congratulate him, too, on his powerful argument and the birth of the campaign on living below the line. Sadly, I cannot join the noble Lord next week in living on a pound a day because I shall be in Mozambique—a country that the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, knows well—delivering speeches on aid effectiveness. So in some ways I am with him in spirit, but I cannot be with him in body on that particular occasion.

Under the bilateral aid and multilateral aid reviews that DfID has just conducted, the aid allocation towards the poorest countries and those containing the largest numbers of poor people living in extreme poverty will increase substantially. Many of these countries face rising civil unrest; some face instability and conflict. Conflicts in various forms are one of the biggest obstacles to poverty reduction. Conflict pushes millions of people into poverty each year, and no sensible development strategy would be complete without focusing on both conflict prevention and post-conflict support. Since 2000, nine out of 10 new conflicts have in fact been relapses as fragile states have fallen back into war. By supporting conflict-affected countries, the United Kingdom is helping some of the poorest countries and people by helping to develop more responsible and accountable Governments, better access to security and justice, and better delivery of services such as health and education, as well as supporting household wealth creation.

One does not have to look far to find examples of extreme poverty related to conflict in the developing world. I recently had the opportunity to visit south and north Sudan—the noble Baroness, Lady Kinnock, and the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, were among the delegation—so we in this House have experienced the reality of conflict and poverty today. Sudan is of course shortly to become two separate and independent countries. There have been remarkable achievements in Sudan under the comprehensive peace agreement, which, after 20 years of civil war, led to a broadly peaceful referendum on the future of Southern Sudan.

However, there are numerous unresolved issues that could destabilise the area. Violence in the first months of 2011, in which 150 people were killed and 15,000 people fled their homes, demonstrates clearly how unstable and volatile that region can be. Violence, still influenced by the history of the war, is linked to a variety of issues: intercommunal violence over resources, especially cattle, land and water, often with a political dimension; human rights violations by security forces, and clashes between the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army and the communities in which it operates; and politically driven violence involving non-state armed groups, often along ethnic lines.

Southern Sudan will become the newest country in the world in July, as well as one of the poorest. In 2010, over 1.5 million people were severely food-insecure. In total, nearly half the population needed food aid at some stage. Over 50,000 children were acutely malnourished, and nearly a quarter of a million people were forced from their homes by violence. A further 400,000 returnees, we understand, are expected to come from Khartoum down into south Sudan in July, during the rainy season, where the danger of transit camps becoming semi-permanent is growing, with little food, overcrowding, no infrastructure and the threat of disease.

In the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo, which I anticipate visiting in a few weeks’ time, nearly three-quarters of the population of some 62 million are not meeting their daily food needs. According to the World Bank, that reflects an extremely high level of poverty. Child mortality is shockingly high, with one in five dying before the age of five—by comparison, the UK average is one in 170. With a healthcare system devastated after years of civil war, maternal mortality rates have risen to more than one in 100. Progress on poverty reduction in the DRC depends on peace and security being consolidated across the country’s enormous territory, which is still facing unrest in the eastern and northern parts. With attacks by elements of the Lord’s Resistance Army, the LRA, this violence continues. I suggest that bringing stability and security to the DRC will require a significant uplift to the DfID programme, which seems currently reliant on aspirations to increase the number of girls going to school, to ensure that everyone who has the right to vote is properly registered, to improve basic health services and to bring maternal care and family planning services to hundreds of thousands of women.

As for the bilateral aid review’s vision for tackling conflict and fragility, as set out by the Secretary of State in a speech at the beginning of March, it is as well to note the assessment of Saferworld, which put the case for the bilateral aid review being a shift not so much towards the securitisation of aid as towards an underlying vision for how to approach conflict-affected or fragile societies. The Secretary of State stressed in March that it was imperative that countries should,

“build open and responsive political systems, tackle the root causes of fragility, and empower citizens to hold their Governments to account”.—[Official Report, Commons, 1/3/11; col. 167.]

This is indeed a worthy ambition. However, putting it into practice, as many noble Lords will know, will require more than just aid money.

Still in the context of the bilateral aid review and the multilateral aid reviews and their technical reports, the process calls for operational plans to be submitted by each DfID country office to carry these reviews through. That is very commendable, but can the Minister tell us when these plans will be published and when we in your Lordships’ House will have an opportunity to look at them in some detail?

In a similar vein, the reviews have recognised that the European Development Fund has one of the best records of aid delivery. I repeat that because some noble Lords may find it a difficult concept to grasp: the EDF is one of the best aid deliverers. Sadly, we cannot say the same for the European Commission, which was severely criticised earlier today by the noble Lord, Lord Sassoon, who made the point that some of its audit work was unacceptable. The Audit Committee has condemned its work there, too. So we need reform, and I should like to hear from the Minister what progress we have made post-ECOFIN in getting reforms on aid pushed through in the European Commission.

In 2000, world leaders committed themselves to a dramatic reduction in child deaths by 2015. As Save the Children has pointed out, there has been extraordinary progress. More than 4 million fewer children died each year than in 1990. However, there is a huge and urgent unfinished agenda with regard to the MDGs. Each and every year, 8 million children still die before they reach their fifth birthday, and 99 per cent of child deaths take place in developing countries. Children from the poorest countries are the least likely to survive. In this regard, Oxfam’s acknowledgement that the significant effort made by DfID in conducting the BARs and MARs is welcome; as it points out, reviewing aid policies to ensure that they deliver the best and most sustainable results for people living in poverty is a welcome and vital process.