Foreign Affairs and International Development

Pauline Latham Excerpts

Tuesday 15th May 2012 Commons Chamber

[Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)]

It is always a delight to follow the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), who is a master of her brief and is completely passionate about her subject, as she has shown again today.

I want to apologise to the House for leaving the Chamber earlier and missing the last two minutes of the shadow Foreign Secretary’s speech. Thirty-nine of my constituents were having tea on the terrace and were leaving at 5.30 pm. I apologise for the discourtesy and also for missing some of the earlier speeches, but those constituents were from the village I live in so I felt that I had to see them.

I congratulate the Secretary of State for International Development on the fact that we are increasing our funding on international development aid from 0.56% to 0.7% from next year. I am delighted that we are doing that. Lots of people have lobbied me to ask why that is not enshrined in legislation and commenting that we cannot guarantee it will happen, but I believe the Secretary of State and the Government that we will deliver the scale of funding that we have committed to achieving next year.

That funding will do much for the people who need it most—the poorest people in the world—but there are one or two worries about the amount and speed at which the Department for International Development is going to have to scale up spending. I hope that DFID is recruiting people from a business background—I am sure it is—because much of the money will fund new start-up businesses and entrepreneurs and go towards skilling people so that they can do that. The only way that people in poor countries can get out of poverty is by having jobs and earning money for themselves. It is no good just giving them a handout every time—we have to give them a hand up by helping them to invest in their own skills and businesses so that they can provide for themselves and their family as well as employing others. That is also the way that this country will get out of this recession. It is important that people in those countries are able to gain skills and come out of poverty, and establishing such a system would be the quickest way of doing that.

I would also like more funding to help women in developing countries. Yesterday, I was fortunate enough to meet some women from Afghanistan and Pakistan through the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association. Those women are very worried that funding is not getting through to women in Afghanistan and they want some ring-fenced money to help women secure their own future. They feel that at the moment it is going to men and is disappearing. A recent report by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact found that money is leaching and that no mechanism in DFID is able to track that money. I am sure that the Secretary of State and his Ministers will have seriously considered that report because we have to stop money disappearing. It has to go to the right places.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

In my experience, the only way to guarantee that aid gets through to women in Afghanistan is for our agents to give it to the women and watch them use it. Does my hon. Friend agree that as soon as intermediaries are used, money starts leaching away—sometimes mightily?

[Pauline Latham]

Yes, I agree completely. It has been shown that women are much better at spending money. They are much more likely to spend it on their families, their relatives, their homes and their children’s health and education, so it is important to give them the money. As soon as men are in the situation that we see them in in northern Pakistan and Afghanistan, we find that the money does not get to the women. I hope that DFID is looking at ways of helping to support those women because that approach will, in turn, support a secure and stable Afghanistan and northern Pakistan.

The women I met are very brave Members of Parliament. If we lose an election, that is the worst that can happen to us, but the worst that can happen to people in some developing countries is that they lose their life. I hope therefore that we are giving support that enables women to continue to put themselves forward for election and assists projects that help women to help their families. They fear that large sums are not getting through to important projects because money is being siphoned off not just at one level but at every level it passes through. I am sure that the Secretary of State and his Ministers will have decided to look at that carefully.

[Dame Joan Ruddock]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for drawing attention to that. Does she agree that when talks take place between the Afghan Government and the Taliban, it is essential that the constitution, which protects the rights of women in Afghanistan, is not interfered with in any way?

[Pauline Latham]

I thank the right hon. Lady for that intervention. She is right. Women must not go backwards. Yesterday I heard the worrying news that in northern Pakistan, which borders Afghanistan, 700 schools have been bombed and girls cannot go to school any more. We must work with Governments to try to ensure that girls get a good education, not just in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but all over the developing world.

I have been to many African countries and have found that the schools there are so badly equipped that the teachers have no resources apart from a blackboard on which to write what they can remember. I am not saying that the children are not learning, because there are some very bright children in those circumstances, but they are not getting a rounded education. Last November or December a friend of mine, the hon. Michael Bayigga-Lulume, who is a Member of Parliament in Uganda, came over to this country and saw some schools in my constituency. He was astonished at the priority that this Government and every Government in Britain have given to schools. He has been to Britain before to attend conferences in Manchester, Birmingham and London, but he has never visited real places. By going into schools, he has recognised that we set huge store by education for all our children, not just girls or boys.

Other countries do not seem to do that. They do not put the necessary investment into schools. Schools require textbooks, and in this day and age they cannot manage without computers, so developing countries need to get their infrastructure sorted out. I suggest to the Under-Secretary, who is present, and to the Secretary of State that perhaps we should set up some exemplars in situ. We should go and equip schools properly, as we would a British school, and for a specific period we should pay for the teachers who have the right skills and the right education in order to promote education in African countries or in countries such as India and Pakistan. We should help them to see what it is like to have a properly resourced school, because without education none of the students will progress to top jobs. They will be able to do ordinary jobs, but they will not be high fliers because they will not have had the opportunities that we have in this country. I suggest that we do something like that to promote education in all the countries where we have a presence.

Not only should we invest in drugs to treat HIV/AIDS and malaria, but we should consider carefully resourcing treatments for diarrhoea. Everybody knows about the HIV/AIDS and malaria drugs, but very often the health problems of young children are caused by diarrhoea. There are many other causes, but it is very cheap to treat diarrhoea in young people with rehydration salts and zinc. We should be promoting that, along with the rapid diagnostic tests that can be done out in the bush, so that the people there can get an accurate diagnosis. If we can help with the health as well as the education of the young people, they will have a much better chance of a decent future in life, with proper resources.

I am always concerned when we provide budget support. It needs careful management by DFID. If we are not careful, we provide budget support for, say, a health budget, and the country says, “Yes, we’ve agreed to spend 15% of our budget on health. Thank you, that’s 6% of it, so we have to provide only 9%.” I always thought that our 6% should be on top of the country’s 15%, not 6% less for it to spend. I would like to see Governments pushed a little more to spend up to the 15% that many countries in Africa have signed up to so that they get a better health service.

Some of the health services that we see are very poor—hospitals for young children with no sheets and no nappies. They have no decent toilets and nowhere for the staff to wash their hands. If members of staff in a hospital cannot wash their hands, they cannot provide proper hygiene. I would like to see us helping with that, but in addition to the country’s own 15%, not instead of it.

We should be pushing and helping with the skills needed for agriculture, particularly in African countries and in India, while we are still there. We should try to help keep people in the countryside, rather than all of them gravitating to the cities, which are not healthy places to live for people with no job and no home, who are running around on the streets. It is better to keep people in the countryside so that they can provide a living for themselves and make the country more self-sufficient in vegetables and fruit. Instead of only one crop, maize, there should be diversity so that the people can become self-sufficient and have better diets. All the people in African countries can have better diets, which will make them healthier, and they will have a better living by getting added value on their crops. I should like to see DFID working hard on that.

I want to mention Congo quickly. In Rwanda we saw a genocide. The same thing is happening in the Congo. Unfortunately, nobody is talking about it. Millions of people are being murdered—slaughtered—and millions of women have been raped, sometimes by members of their own family, because their own families will be killed if they do not do it.

[Alex Cunningham]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Pauline Latham]

I am sorry, but I am running out of time.

We should be doing more to help those poor women who are struggling in their own country to have a proper living. We should be pushing the UN to do far more to help them, and we should recognise that a genocide is taking place there. It is not just a little local uprising.