Global Poverty

Richard Ottaway Excerpts

Thursday 1st July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Mitchell]

I am going to make a bit of progress, and then I will of course give way.

Building up civil society in the developing world is crucial to enabling citizens to hold their own political leaders to account. The transparency guarantee will help to create millions of independent aid watchdogs—people around the world who can see where aid is supposed to be going and shout if it does not get there. From January, we will publish full details of DFID projects and programmes on our website so that everyone can have access to information about where our funding is going and what it is intended to achieve. The simple act of publishing information can reduce the amount of corruption and waste, improve the quality of public services and increase public sector accountability.

I wish to make two further points about Britain’s bilateral aid programme. First, where it is relevant, in every country where DFID is active we will pay particular attention to the fight against malaria. It will be the responsibility of my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for International Development, whose involvement, expertise and knowledge in the matter is well known to the House. It is simply unconscionable that in this day and age, thousands of children and adults die every day from that completely preventable disease. If there were an outbreak of malaria in Europe it would immediately be stopped in its tracks. Reducing the burden of malaria in the developing world and focusing on the areas of highest infection will be an essential part of our programmes.

Secondly, we must extend far further choice for women over whether and when they have children. It is outrageous that today in sub-Saharan Africa, only 15% of women have access to modern methods of contraception. I simply lay this fact before the House: every year, 20 million women have unsafe abortions, and 70,000 of them, many still girls, die as a result. Some 215 million women around the world who want to use modern contraception do not have access to it. No statistic could more eloquently underline the importance of allowing women to choose whether to have children, and we will pursue that argument vigorously and single-mindedly.

I invite the House to consider the further point that in Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world, a population of 3 million in 1960 has grown to nearly 16 million today, and expert opinion judges that it will rise to nearly 60 million in the next 40 years. It is a country that suffers deeply from political, economic, climate and food insecurity. As I said last week in Washington, Britain will place women at the heart of our whole agenda for international development.

That subject is closely related to the Prime Minister’s insistence at the G8 last weekend on combined action on maternal and child mortality. As he made clear in Muskoka, a woman’s chances of dying in pregnancy and childbirth are one in 8,200 in the UK, whereas in Sierra Leone they are a stark one in eight. The resources agreed at the G8, including a significant contribution from the United Kingdom, should lead to an additional 1.3 million lives being saved.

[Richard Ottaway (Croydon South) (Con)]

I welcome what my right hon. Friend has just said. It is not just helping women that is to be welcomed, because it is a simple fact that no country has got itself out of poverty without first stabilising its levels of population growth. Furthermore, we are very unlikely to achieve the millennium development goals without stabilising population development. I warmly welcome his points and I urge him to give even greater emphasis to a global family planning approach to aid.

[Mr Mitchell]

I thank my hon. Friend very much for those comments. As the House will know, he can probably lay claim to being the House’s greatest expert on population issues.

Important though aid is, it is only part of the solution—a means to an end rather than an end in itself. The key to development is sustained economic growth. Over the years ahead we will help more countries put in place the building blocks of wealth creation—trade, a vibrant private sector, property rights and a low-carbon, climate-resilient economy. We are reorganising the structure of the Department to ensure a sharper focus on wealth creation and economic growth. I will give the House further details of that in due course. I am also considering carefully the contribution made through CDC and considering how to improve its capacity to take forward development objectives.

I turn to the support that we give to the brilliant non-governmental organisations, charities and civil society institutions whose work I have seen all around the world. It is often inspirational and a huge credit not just to their supporters but to Britain itself. They make an outstanding contribution to development work. As we said in opposition, we want to develop that work through our poverty impact fund. The principle of that fund will be both simple and clear: if an NGO is engaged in development work that takes forward the millennium development goals, we will be prepared to match-fund its budget if it, in turn, can increase its outputs and outcomes accordingly. That will, of course, be subject to our being satisfied of the probity of its funding and accounts. The fund will enable the taxpayer to piggyback on the expertise and development results of some of Britain’s best charities and NGOs. Again, I will report to the House on progress in due course.

As I mentioned earlier, we will never forget that one of the biggest barriers to global prosperity is conflict. Helping affected states and their people on to the ladder of prosperity is the greatest challenge of our time, so we will make conflict prevention, resolution and reconstruction central to our approach to development. I have visited both Afghanistan and Pakistan within the first few weeks since being appointed and witnessed at first hand the real challenges that exist in those countries. Together with the Foreign Secretary and the Defence Secretary, I was able to spend time not only with the Government of Afghanistan but with the brave men and women of our armed forces, who are doing such important but difficult and dangerous work.