International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Lord Chidgey Excerpts

Friday 23rd January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Chidgey (LD)]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to my noble friend Lord Purvis on the way in which he brought the Bill to this House. It is absolutely first-class. I echo his remarks on the quote from the National Audit Office on managing the ODA target. It states that DfID,

“worked hard to manage the substantial increase in its budget, completing preparatory work to strengthen … business processes, increasing the capacity of its workforce, and improving its”,

focus on capturing the results of its spending. Those words will be remembered for many months.

I remind noble Lords of what our ODA expenditure achieves and can achieve if this Bill is passed. UK aid saves lives around the world every day. It provides more than 40 million people with clean drinking water. It puts more than 10 million children in school. It delivers emergency food assistance to more than 11 million people. It provides 54 million people with access to financial services that helps them to work their own way out of poverty. UK aid has the potential to transform the lives of millions of people around the world. This Bill will enshrine that potential into law.

The facts and figures about world poverty and disease provided by NGOs such as Bond, Save the Children, UNICEF and RESULTS, which many Members will have received, make sobering reading. Nearly 14 million people die every year from poverty-related diseases, including TB, which we nearly eradicated some decades ago, and HIV/AIDS, which are each responsible for 1.5 million deaths every year. Globally, 35 million people live with HIV/AIDS.

Since 2002, the Global Fund has contributed hugely to the campaign to eradicate TB, funding the treatment of more than 12 million people. Since its inception in 2002, the Global Fund has helped to save nearly 9 million lives. DfID has pledged up to £1 billion pounds to the Global Fund over the next three years, which will save a life every three minutes and is an eloquent answer to those who might doubt the efficacy of DfID’s 0.7% of GNI budget being taken into law.

Since I entered your Lordships’ House in 2005, and particularly in this Parliament, I have been very fortunate to have had the opportunity, as a parliamentary representative, to see for myself the impact of some of the work that DfID is doing. For example, in Malawi, DfID wrestled with the tangle of local administrative practices that hindered the distribution of vaccines and dietary support for children. That has been overcome through a very tenacious approach to its task.

At the other end of the world, in Bihar state in northern India, with a population of more than 103 million, stunting and malnutrition are endemic. DfID is working with its Department of Agriculture. Although our aid programme is coming to an end, technical support continues. In that support DfID is helping the Department of Agriculture to develop crops with a higher nutrition content, expand crop diversity and access infrastructure to markets, cold storage and packaging and marketing skills, in an attempt to reduce the 40% of produce that is currently wasted.

In Ethiopia and Kenya, the story is even more upbeat, with DfID providing major support for Ethiopia’s land and agricultural reform programmes, which are aimed at unlocking the vast potential in the economy for developing an agricultural base. That is a precursor to an industrialised economy. In Kenya, DfID is supporting a small UK company that has invented a revolutionary and simple tank-fed system for regulating crop irrigation, which minimises water wastage in the process.

After these positives, one can only despair at the situation in Sudan and South Sudan, where millions have been displaced and thousands of children orphaned. The DfID teams work on, but some tragedies are difficult to deal with; for example, in Juba, seeing the plight of children as young as three and no older than eight attending an ad hoc playgroup run and supported by volunteers from UK NGOs. Talking to them through interpreters, we learnt that one little girl wanted to be a doctor. The dearest wish of another was to be adopted. The reality was that the children were found every morning wandering in the Juba markets, and brought in to be washed, fed and clothed. But in the evening, there was no alternative but to return them to the markets to find places to sleep. Their future was grim. The girls would be taken into one of the market brothels by the age of 11 and probably be dead by the age of 13. For the boys, the future was even grimmer.

Now, we have Ebola. In Sierra Leone, DfID, together with Save the Children, the British Army and NHS volunteers, has stepped up to the plate. They have prevented the Ebola outbreak turning into a pandemic, with potentially hundreds of thousands of victims. Dr David Nabarro, the UN Ebola special envoy, has described their effort as magnificent. I tracked him down in Davos to ask his views on the 0.7% of GNI for aid. He e-mailed me last night to say, in terms, that it gives the UK potential for significant impact and has massive benefit for poor countries. The UK and countries that commit to the target are more respected internationally and able to advocate more strongly for other donors to increase their development aid contributions. It is a very good thing.

From all these international debates and deliberations, one thing is abundantly clear. DfID has a formidable reputation among its peers around the world. It sets standards and achieves goals that are the envy of many. Adding legal force to a 0.7% commitment of GNI to the development aid budget can only reinforce the respect and leadership that DfID and the UK enjoy in the developing world.