Developing Countries: Jobs and Livelihoods

Stuart Blair Donaldson Excerpts

Wednesday 15th June 2016 Westminster Hall

[Stuart Blair Donaldson (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairpersonship, Mrs Moon. I congratulate the hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) on securing this debate. It is not the first of his debates in which I have spoken in this place, and I am sure it will not be the last. I am delighted to contribute today.

As Members have said, goal 8 of the 2015 UN sustainable development goals makes promoting inclusive and sustainable economic growth, employment and decent work for all a key objective for the world to achieve by 2030. Sustainable economic growth will require societies to create the conditions that allow people to have quality jobs that stimulate the economy while not harming the environment. Job opportunities and decent working conditions are also required for the whole working-age population. An adequate supply of jobs is the foundation of sustained and growing prosperity, inclusion and social cohesion. Where jobs are scarce or where livelihoods leave households in poverty, there is less growth, less security and less human and economic development.

In the current turbulent economic environment, job creation is one of the most pressing global development priorities. The aim to support employment and livelihoods with rising incomes, dignity and respect is a development goal that the Scottish National party would like to see at the heart of the UK’s development agenda. Jobs connect people to their society and the economy. Access to safe, productive and fairly remunerated work is a key vehicle for battling poverty.

As has been mentioned, the World Development Report 2013 found that:

“Worldwide, 200 million people, a disproportionate share of them youth, are unemployed and actively looking for work. An estimated 620 million youth, the majority of them women, are neither working nor looking for work. Just to keep employment rates constant, around 600 million new jobs will have to be created over a 15-year period.”

It also highlighted that the problem in many developing countries was that, although unemployment rates could be low, only a minority of workers were wage earners. More than 3 billion people are working worldwide, but almost half of them are farmers or self-employed. Most of the poor work long hours, but simply cannot make ends meet.

The SNP is committed to advancing Scotland’s place in the world as a responsible nation by building mutually beneficial links with other countries, as outlined in the Scottish Government’s international framework. Since 2007, the Scottish Government have doubled the international development fund to £9 million per annum and launched the climate justice fund, bringing the total spend on international development work since 2007 to over £86 million. The SNP has also highlighted Scotland’s commitment to the sustainable development goals.

Work funded by the Scottish Government has included projects focusing on job development and economic growth in Malawi. For over a decade, they have supported the Scotland Malawi Partnership and its sister organisation, the Malawi Scotland Partnership, which is based in Malawi. Through the two organisations, more than 94,000 Scots and 198,000 Malawians work in partnership together, and more than 300,000 Scots and 2 million Malawians benefit from those activities every year. The main focus of the Scotland Malawi Partnership is to work in dignified partnership with local people or Ubale, as they say in Chichewa. Scotland is playing an active and important role in helping to support jobs and livelihoods in Malawi by building markets for Malawian products.

Kilombero rice is a high-quality aromatic rice which the Malawi Government believe is an important export crop. For smallholder farmers it is an effective cash crop, which is popular among the urban population. The challenge is to assist more farmers to turn their smallholdings into effective, market-orientated, small businesses, which together can dramatically improve the livelihoods of people in northern Malawi.

JTS—Just Trading Scotland—is a Scottish fair trade importer. KASFA—Kaporo Smallholder Farmers Association—is a farmers’ association in northern Malawi. They have been working together, with support from the Scottish Government’s international development fund, to improve livelihoods and to strengthen communities. Since 2009, JTS has been working to establish a market for Kilombero rice, selling through civic society groups in Scotland: schools, churches and fair trade groups. This in turn has encouraged fine food distributor, Cotswold Fayre, and larger retailers like the Co-op to stock the product.

Howard Msukwa and Kenneth Mwakasungula, who are both rice farmers, visited Scotland last month to promote the launch of the rice in Co-operative food stores across Scotland and to tell people about the project’s success. The benefits of the scheme have been recognised by local rice farmers in Malawi. I had the pleasure of hearing both gentlemen speak at the Scotland Malawi Partnership road trip in Aberdeen.

Over the last five years, membership of the farming association in Malawi has grown from 2,500 to 6,700. Northern Malawi now has an effective farmers’ organisation that can deliver training and cost-effective farm inputs, and plays a vital role in community development. More farmers can send their children to secondary school and the first students are finding places in universities and colleges.

The key to success has been to link farm development work with establishing markets, which offers farmers an assured income. This encourages them to invest time and money to transform their farms. With altitude, climate and weather conditions ideal for cultivating coffee, Mzuzu coffee is another crop with a fast-growing reputation from one of the best coffee-growing regions in the world. In the 2014-15 Malawi “taste of harvest coffee” competition, Mzuzu took the top five positions. Interestingly, the first coffee plant in Malawi was introduced in the 1870s by John Buchanan from Scotland—it originated in the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, so there is a strong historical link.

The recently completed project by Scottish Government-funded TraCSS—Trading with Climate Smart Supply—aimed to stimulate sustainable economic growth in Malawi through development of agricultural value chains in a climate-smart and pro-poor way. The objective was to improve the competiveness of tea, coffee and pigeon pea value chains in an inclusive way to deliver improved smallholder incomes and to reduce natural resource degradation. One of the outcomes of the project was the distribution and implementation of the “Handbook for Sustainable Coffee Production in Malawi” through the Coffee Association of Malawi—CAMAL.

I am coming to the end of my time. The work of the Scottish Government and the Scotland Malawi Partnership demonstrates how Government aid and civic society can work to create markets for developing countries that will support jobs and livelihoods in the developing world.