Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs how much and what proportion of the humanitarian aid budget has been allocated to preventing (a) maternal and (b) newborn deaths over the past three years; and what assessment he has made of the potential impact of reductions in the humanitarian aid budget on future funding in this area.

Official Development Assistance (ODA) expenditure is reported via the Statistics on International Development publications (https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-on-international-development).

We report spending based on OECD Development and Assistance Committee sector codes. The UK takes a multisectoral approach to ending preventable maternal, child and newborn deaths. We do not hold data to accurately estimate the humanitarian aid budget specifically for preventing maternal and newborn deaths. The tables below show bilateral spending on sectors contributing to Reproductive Maternal Newborn and Child Health but do not represent that the total of this funding was therefore used on it as it is not possible to disaggregate. Core funding was excluded from these estimates, as it is used flexibly by partners and its contribution to specific sectors cannot be tracked directly.

Table 1: UK humanitarian programme bilateral ODA on sector codes contributing to Reproductive Maternal Newborn and Child Health (RMNCH), in £:

Note: figures rounded to the nearest hundred thousand. Based on OECD sector codes: 12110, 12220, 12240, 12250, 12261, 12262, 12263, 12281, 13020, 13040, 14030, 14031, 14032.

The transition to spending 0.3 per cent of GNI on ODA will require significant shifts, building on those already underway as the government implements its modernised approach to development. Decisions on how the ODA budget will be used are being worked through, based on various factors including impact assessments.