Oral evidence: DFID’s Allocation of Resources, HC 533Tuesday 19 January 2016
Oral evidence, 19 January 2016.
Witnesses
Jonathan Glennie, Director of Policy, Save the Children, Girish Menon, Chief Executive, ActionAid UK, and Aaron Oxley, Executive Director of RESULTS UK, Action for Global Health, gave evidence.
Chair
Can I welcome our second panel of witnesses? Thank you very much indeed for joining us. As with the first panel, we have a lot of ground to cover. I am sure you all have a lot of things to say, which is fantastic, but we only have about 45 minutes to do it, and we have six or seven questions, so if all of us could just bear that in mind, both those of us asking the questions and those of you answering. Let me kick off in the way that I did with the previous witnesses: do you think the new UK aid strategy has the right focus?
Girish Menon
Good morning, Chair, and thank you very much to the Committee for having me here and this opportunity to give evidence. We need to welcome a number of key positives in the new strategy, if I could highlight some of them. The first one is about the potential for cross-departmental working, which is absolutely key. It has the potential to contribute significantly to policy coherence across the UK Government. There is also the work on tax that is mentioned in the document, which links to the agenda of Beyond Aid, which is very positive. The focus on fragile states is something we absolutely welcome, including a focus on disasters, climate change and diseases, all of which are absolutely critical for human development. That said, we have a few concerns and that is what I would like to highlight. The first one is a risk of a potential loss of poverty reduction as the overarching agenda for UK aid, and a move away from social spending could have a devastating impact on everything that DFID has done in the past in improving the lot of women and girls, who are, across all contexts, the most marginalised. Finally, there is a question of accountability in a context where a large proportion of the aid budget is going to be spent across five to seven different Departments.
Jonathan Glennie
Thanks for having me. I agree with a lot of what Girish said. We think, at Save the Children, that there is a really good amount of good stuff in this. The overall clear focus on national interest is, to some degree, really sensible, especially given the political context. In my view, it is re-expressed very boldly. It is not necessarily that new; most aid donors—the UK included—have always balanced the moral duty and poverty focus with a degree of long‑term and sometimes slightly shorter‑term national interests. That is something to be looked at. We have to be careful with it and that is something we may come on to later, but that is fine. The focus on fragile states is also something we welcome. I would have a particular concern about making sure it is joined up with other donors. It is one thing that is not mentioned. One of my criticisms in the previous round of the aid reviews, and with this one, is that there is not a huge emphasis on what other parts of the international aid community are doing. You cannot make a decision about ramping up money in a particular country in a particular way and in particular sectors without looking at what everyone else is doing. It is not mentioned very much here. It is not mentioned very much by DFID in general. That would be a concern, but broadly speaking, yes, we share some concern about what is going to happen to aid to stable, low‑income countries that maybe do not make the headlines. However, that is the kind of classic aid fare. We know it is effective, much less risky and all that. The one overall concern I have with this document is that it feels a little bit back to the future in some ways. Let us be honest: we do not know as much as we would like to, or sometimes pretend we do, about how we make aid effective. This document is written as if we know how you do it: “Let’s cancel all the ones that do not work; let’s build on all the ones that do work.” That is fine and we have to make that analysis. There are some very great brains, some of them in this room, that are doing that. However, the reality is that we do not know as much as we would like to. There is one thing we do know, which all the research points to, and that in the first 10 years of this century we spent a lot of time embedding. If you try to do it without partnering clearly with aid recipients, beneficiary governments and beneficiary organisations, the chances of achieving effective aid interventions are very, very small. You have to focus on building relationships with the places that are purportedly receiving aid. It is called ownership in some language. It is the heart of the Paris Declaration and all that aid effectiveness work that we have done, which is nowhere to be seen in this document or anywhere else, from what I can see, in DFID’s and the Government’s overall discussion of aid. That is a very, very dangerous road to be going down. Of course we support results. We support value for money. We support most of the things in this document, and we can go into them in more detail. We do not have to reinvent the wheel. The work has been done. It is in the Paris agenda. You have to focus on building relationships and systems with beneficiaries. I would love to see a lot more of that in future documents of this kind.
Chair
You mentioned Paris, but that also presumably applies to the sustainable development goals as well; would it be fair to say that there is a sense that this document does not reflect what the UK said in New York, as well as in Paris?
Jonathan Glennie
It does not reflect Paris, quite seriously. I would not say that about the SDGs; I think it fairly does. They have done a good job and the UK has played a huge role in pushing this—especially this “Leave no one behind” agenda—focus on the most excluded. Yes, we are slightly concerned about the possibility of moving money away from low‑income countries, but we are not concerned about the British Government’s focus on the most excluded groups—in our case, the most excluded children—which has been absolutely central to this document and to the UK Government’s approach. More broadly, the prosperity agenda is also something that I associate very much with the SDGs. It is not just focusing on the poorest. It is building countries’ abilities to respond to their own problems through improved, growing economies. There is a whole bunch of stuff. If there is one criticism, and you have prompted me to it, it is an aid strategy. Therefore, it talks mostly about aid. It would be nice to see it within the context of the Government’s overall development strategy, which is much bigger than aid. It is not placed within that context. Maybe there is a different document that does place it within that context.
Aaron Oxley
In terms of whether the document has the right emphasis, when you are laying out a whole pile of new areas that you are going to be expanding your work in, you need to emphasise those, and those come through very strongly. On first reading, tackling extreme poverty and helping the world’s most vulnerable is the fourth bullet point of four and does not come out as strongly in the document as DFID has traditionally kept focus on—indeed, from the International Development Act back in 2002. This was something that raised a few eyebrows. On reading the document, you see quite a lot of appealing to the UK’s national interest, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is obviously great if you can do both. However, we need to remind ourselves what we are doing this for and who we are doing this for. It seems odd that we need to continually make the case for aid, in the sense of bringing it back into the UK public national interest, because the UK public, for the most part, does get the moral good that our aid money does. There is appeal after appeal, like Comic Relief and The Guardian’s recent appeal on the refugee and migrant crisis, which had huge public responses. The fact that this is something with its own good is a case that could have been made more strongly in the analysis and it underlies the document. Just to re-emphasise the two previous contributions, particularly around partnership, which is absolutely essential, if we look at where we are going to be going in the next 15 years with the sustainable development goals and the end of extreme poverty, we are on a pretty tight timeframe with it. We should be planning for success and that will require partnership on all levels.
Mr Sharma
Jonathan touched upon that lack of—the term that Aaron used—partnership shown in this document. Do you think it is too late, or do you feel there is still time, and that we can start working in partnership to have that visionary approach for the future?
Jonathan Glennie
It certainly is not too late. I am sure a lot of colleagues in DFID, in London and around the world, would emphasise that they do constantly work in partnership. It is not like that will suddenly stop. That happens the whole time. It is just the rhetoric or language; ultimately, this strategy may or may not shift things hugely but it is implying a way of thinking about aid and, in some aspects, that is different from where we were at five or so years ago, when partnership would have been absolutely essential to a document like this. I literally just flicked through it again and could hardly find it. It feels like this is like DFID, or rather the UK Government, going out and sorting stuff out. That does not work and we have to remind ourselves about that. There is also this concern that DFID colleagues will get that because they know. However, it is hard to spend aid effectively. The best case for aid that can be made is not rhetoric or a really well written strategy; it is effectively spent aid. We would be worried about people thinking that they know how to spend aid—a little trait of the British is generally thinking they know how to do stuff—and actually not. We would want DFID colleagues to really have a strong influence over the way that the rest of the Government spend aid, because they really do know the partnership stuff.
Chair
I am getting lots of questioners and answerers wanting to come in and we are still on the first question. I will take Girish and Jeremy, but we are going to have to be very, very disciplined in the other questions, if we do not want to overrun.
Girish Menon
Thank you very much. I have a very quick point on the partnerships: it is about how the aid strategy can align itself with nationally driven plans and resources so that it is not seen as a purely external intervention, but it builds the capacity of national governments to both plan and deliver. That is what will make it effective from a partnerships perspective.
Jeremy Lefroy
Given that DFID spends the highest amount, in terms of proportion, on multilateral organisations—for example the Global Fund, which specifically works in partnership with countries’ governments and funds those proposals that are put forward by those governments—does that not rather dampen down the point you are making, because DFID is working in partnership through multilaterals more than any organisation I can think of?
Jonathan Glennie
I have just made that point; DFID is doing it. The danger is that DFID colleagues are slightly less pressured to do so by strategies such as this, which does not make it one of the big things. It does not say, “Go out—you are doing brilliant partnerships; now redouble your efforts on partnerships.” It falls away from that a bit. It says, “Go out and make sure you get these results that we know how to get”. That is just the balance that you have to get right.
Albert Owen
I will try to bring it in to the first set of answers where you talked about the strategy. It does not stand alone. There are a number of reviews going on. There is an opportunity for DFID to bring the strategy into its major reviews and learn from the past and plan for the future. Do you accept that these reviews are a good opportunity for that to happen?
Girish Menon
Yes. We are told that the bilateral and multilateral aid reviews are coming through, so that would be a good opportunity to answer some of the “how” questions. On the partnership side, we are still awaiting the outcomes from the Civil Society Partnership Review and we still do not quite know the timelines for that. There are some concerns coming from around the discussions. For example, civil society more generally has been very pleased with how PPAs have worked and there are a number of independent evaluations to show that PPAs have delivered results and are quite effective. Yet, we hear that there are moves to move away from a PPA type of mechanism, without understanding what is driving the potential decision to move away from that. Yes, we are looking forward to the outcomes of those reviews.
Albert Owen
Does anybody else want to comment on that? Can I just ask one final question? How well do you think DFID measures the effectiveness of the multilateral and bilateral programmes? Do you think it is an effective way of doing it, or would you like to see improvements?
Aaron Oxley
DFID has really led the world in looking at both multilateral and bilateral aid reviews. It was really telling that after the 2010 round of reviews finished, Australia did a similar exercise. Yes, DFID does a great job of doing that. The challenge there is, again, under what criteria the organisations in question will be judged. There you get into some really interesting territory where you are looking at questions about transparency or alignment with UK priorities versus countries’ own priorities. The Global Fund is a very good example; I am glad that Jeremy made the point. It is how their programming is strongly in alignment with countries. If we are talking, like some of the previous speakers, about how that is in alignment with building up of civil society and those broader institutions then that can help hold a Government to account, provide good services for citizens. The UK investments in the Global Fund are doing exactly that kind of thing.
Albert Owen
Jonathan, DFID is leading the world, but can it improve?
Jonathan Glennie
It probably is leading the world. Donors in general, especially the biggest ones, but also some of the private ones, are way, way better at checking and accounting for the way money is spent than ever before. In fact, it holds organisations like us to account, in a way that maybe was not the case 20 years ago, which has to be a good thing. It pressures our kinds of organisations, or all kinds of organisations that receive money, and governments who receive money, to show that the money is being spent effectively. There is a danger, annoyingly, of this tension. Someone mentioned it earlier; if you have a 10-year—really, it is longer—development time horizon, that is what really effective aid means. It is possible to deliver short‑term results, tick the box and move on, and this happens a lot in development, constantly; it has happened for decades. All of a sudden, five years later, there is a huge conflict or, classically, the toilet is being used to hold grain because it was not thought through properly or, most important of all, systems have not been put in place to deliver long-term health and education to citizens after aid donors have withdrawn. That is the kind of effective aid that I do not think anyone is good at analysing yet, and I am worried that DFID is not emphasising that kind of thing in this strategy. It is more about the short‑term, value-for-money or results agenda, which is a part of it, but not the totality.
Fiona Bruce
Jonathan, if I can just ask you to expand on this? My key question was going to be how well DFID does on supporting NGOs in long-term planning and achieving long-term goals. You have partly said that you are very concerned about that. How could it do better? Just in the context of that also, if anyone in the panel wants to touch on the question I asked earlier, but only if they have something to add, do you think DFID has the in‑country and the in‑house capacity to operate this scaling-up of spending of 50% on fragile states? Is its structure right to help long-term transformative change?
Jonathan Glennie
I am going to pass that one to Girish, but very briefly to say that Save the Children also supports the PPA system. We think it works well and it is so important for organisations like ourselves to have long-term funding that is not all box‑checking and supports the structure. I will let Girish answer.
Girish Menon
What NGOs are focusing on is transformational change, and it is moving away from a very projectised method of delivering services to, as Jonathan mentioned, strengthening the systems of delivery. It is looking at both the demand side and the supply side of things. On the supply side, it is looking at the capacity of the Governments to deliver. On the demand side, it is looking at citizen engagement and the voice. That requires a fairly flexible form of funding that is more strategic and not just looking at the numbers of toilets constructed or children immunised, but at the overall long‑term capacity, so that, again as Jonathan said, when the donors withdraw, that capacity is sustained over a period of time and there are enough domestic resources which will continue to support the delivery of those services. That requires a long-term engagement with the governments to change, influence and advocate for that change, working in partnership with local communities. That is what a mechanism like the PPA enables NGOs to do. If we are going back to considering more projectised ways of delivery it is possibly a retrograde step, in my view. That is where DFID needs to think of how any future successor of the PPA mechanism provides a way to be strategic, flexible and responsive to invest in long‑term sustainable development.
Fiona Bruce
One of the easier things about short-term projects is you can measure things. What are the challenges of measuring impact when working on longer-term projects in fragile states? How can we go about that effectively?
Girish Menon
Measuring impact is not easy and that requires this whole partnership, which colleagues were talking about, not just between DFID and governments but a number of other agencies working there, and civil society and local communities. However, it is not impossible. For example, if we are looking at Myanmar right now, and DFID is quite interested in focusing on Myanmar, there is a whole transition that we see in the country. It is possible to set up measures of success. One of my concerns about this document as well is that it does not define what success looks like. We have a strategy and any good strategy needs to have a strong section that talks about measures of success. Five years down the line, how do we know that the UK Government has been successful in implementing the strategy when those measures are not in place? That needs to be there at the very strategic and top level, and at the level of intervention. On your earlier question on fragile states, there needs to be a very clear understanding of what the criteria are that define fragility. I understand that at this point in time DFID are thinking of three criteria, which are economic and social stress, state capacity and the potential instability in the neighbouring states. If those are the criteria for fragility, it gives an opportunity for DFID to work with the national governments and with other agencies working in the country to talk about what kind of transformation they are looking at. Is it fragility from an economic context? Is it an environmental fragility? Is it political fragility? Fragility comes in all shapes and forms. Unless we are clear on what we are signing up to and aligning our resources to that, it is very difficult to say whether we can measure impact or not. That is a dialogue that needs to take place as part of implementing the strategy.
Chair
Just so I understand it, is your view that it would make sense to have a broader definition of fragility than the one that has been used in the past?
Girish Menon
What I am trying to say is that we need to have clarity on what the UK Government means by fragility. I could potentially argue that Malawi is a fragile country, but would it fall in the list of fragility? It is one of the least developed countries. It is poor. It is stable, but it is potentially on the brink of stability because its Government may not have the resources to invest in basic services. If that continues, it is very difficult for the Government to be termed as a stable Government because it creates a crisis of a different kind, as we saw in Liberia and Sierra Leone, when the health systems completely broke down, which is what caused the Ebola epidemic.
Aaron Oxley
If we are talking about long-term support for civil society, it is also looking at not just civil society but a Government ending budget support in their strategies, which is an interesting decision. Looking at, for example, something like the concept of universal health coverage, the kind of thing that can bring to a population and the work that needs to go in to build up a health system, there is something that DFID and indeed the UK in general has a lot of expertise on. There are a lot of great UK doctors and nurses helping abroad with exactly that kind of thing. This also links back to certain questions raised in the previous section about the prosperity agenda. Some of the really smart investments that DFID has made through that prosperity lens, in terms of supporting revenue services and in terms of countries being able to build out their own tax base and fund all these interventions themselves. If we do all this right, we do get into this virtuous cycle of the state being able to build its capacity and build in the basic services that we have heard help reduce fragility in so many different ways, and then continue to drive that prosperity agenda. These are all really important elements of this strategy and it is critical we get them to work together well.
Fiona Bruce
On the PPA, am I right that the average length is about three years for these agreements? Are you saying that it needs to be longer for NGOs in the funding? Is that what you are saying?
Girish Menon
Yes, but we also understand that the PPA may not be part of the DFID mechanism for supporting the civil society after the Civil Society Partnership Review. That is what we understand; it is not a confirmed decision. What I was trying to say is that that is an absolutely fantastic tool or instrument to support us in bringing about the transformational change in partnership with DFID and national governments. Any potential successor of the PPA needs to be a) long‑term, b) strategic, and c) flexible.
Fiona Bruce
That is what I am trying to get at. Previous witnesses in the last Parliament did indicate longer-term commitment for NGOs from DFID would make a big difference to them being able to plan transformationally. I do not want to put words in your mouth, but I am seeking an answer.
Jonathan Glennie
The more money that is what we call unrestricted—now, that may not sound very good to you guys, but it is actually flexible for us to spend as we see fit—the easier it is for us to do our job. The higher the percentage of our organisation that is unrestricted, which means responding penny for penny to our donors—that is part of our world and it is absolutely understandable but we need a balance. If we end up with 90% basically implementing what we are being paid to do, quite specifically, that is quite a dangerous place to be. I do not know if I have expressed that very well. I hope you understand what I am saying. Let me express it in a different way: I have managed multi-million-dollar aid programmes. Just to put two extremes; there are different ways of managing the money, which all goes to other organisations. There is the “Audit every penny” and then there is the “I really know this organisation well”. They are two extremes; of course you do both. You try to know the organisation you are working with as well as possible and, of course, you have to audit the money. However, when you are in a situation where you do not know the organisation and you are just depending on audit, that is not a good accountability system at all. That is a desperately weak one. That is the last resort. What you want to be doing is building over five, 10 or—in the case where I was working—15 or 20-year—relationships with organisations. You know the people. You know what they are trying to do. You trust them. Sure, they might have made a mistake here or there. “Let’s work together to work it out”, rather than, “Oh my God. What are these numbers on the spreadsheet?” A lot of the reporting that is done is technocratic or bureaucratic and that is good; there is a place for that. The international development world has got a lot better in the last five, 10 or 15 years in actually making aid spenders report for their spend. That is fine, but let’s not lose that long‑term building of relationships, because ultimately that is what matters, whether it is with international or local NGOs or with Governments. Anyone who works on this kind of stuff knows that you can audit till the cows come home, but it is the relationships that matter. Ultimately, we know we have been effective once we have been working for a long period of time and not through simplistic responses. Briefly, on fragility, Girish mentioned Sierra Leone and Liberia, our really clear lesson from the Ebola outbreak was: where are the systems? We responded quite well in a very difficult situation. Save the Children are very proud of the role we played in that. Nevertheless, the lesson was: where were the systems before that? That is the same when we think about Malawi. We are not that worried about DFID and the Government moving away from low-income countries. We are slightly worried, but not that worried. It would be the wrong thing to do if they did because you have to build systems precisely in the currently stable countries so that they do not move on to crisis, whether that be conflict, disease or other forms of environmental problems.
Jeremy Lefroy
Could we move on to the definition of ODA and the upcoming discussion of that at the OECD? There are two areas that are particularly prominent at the moment: one is measurement of peace and security and the other is measurement of private‑sector expenditure and particularly the kind of financial instruments that are being used. Would anybody like to comment on that and give their views on where they think things should change and where they should not?
Girish Menon
I have one quick point on that, thank you very much. We think that any definition of ODA must, at its centre, be about poverty reduction. That should be the provision of the International Development Act of 2002. Therefore, in that context, we would be a bit concerned if there was an attempt to broaden the scope of ODA to include other forms of expenditure that are being discussed at this point in time.
Jeremy Lefroy
If I can just come back to you on that, at the moment, for instance, if you take other countries, a substantial part of ODA is often in the form of loans rather than grants. Long-term loans—of course they count as negative ODA when they are repaid, but that may be 10 or 20 years down the line. What is your view on that?
Girish Menon
It needs to be seen in the context of the recipient Government. For example, if it is to some of the middle income countries, potentially it is something that they are resilient enough to consider as an instrument. However, if that is said in the context of Liberia or Sierra Leone, it is just not going to benefit. It is going to be a huge burden, which we have seen in the past with World Bank loans.
Jeremy Lefroy
Thanks for that very precise answer, which goes to the nub of the point. On to the classification of middle-income countries, because ODA is applied to low and middle-income countries but the difference between the low and the high part of the middle-income range is enormous, do you think there should be any consideration of that, considering that some middle-income countries go up to about $13,000 or $14,000 per head per year?
Girish Menon
Absolutely. We now talk about countries like Ghana and Zambia, which sit in the middle‑income range. It is rather unusual. One would never think that they would sit in the middle-income range. That brings in the whole discussion on inequality. Oxfam has, just earlier this week, published a report that talks about 1% of the population earning more wealth than the rest of the population. That is very important and we do not find enough reference to issues about inequality of wealth or inequality of power, for that matter, in the UK’s strategy. When we talk about middle-income, we need to take it with a pinch of salt. Zambia, by no stretch of the imagination can be a middle-income country and be in the same category as China, India or Brazil, for that matter.
Jeremy Lefroy
Or Turkey.
Girish Menon
Or Turkey, indeed.
Jonathan Glennie
I had to inform the economic adviser of the President of South Sudan once that his country was a middle-income country. He did not know, because their oil receipts had just gone through the roof. I do not use “middle-income” anymore. It is a really, really misleading term. I have been at meetings such as this where people describe India as wealthy. A whole bunch of middle-income countries are described as out of the woods; they are not. It is a really, really misleading term.
Jeremy Lefroy
Do you think, in that case, that the OECD really needs to look at this whole concept of “middle-income country”?
Jonathan Glennie
It is the World Bank that manages that term. The previous World Bank economist has himself said in public that it is a misleading term and we should not use it anymore; we should move on from that. There are some categories that are useful. “Least developed countries” is a kind of self-declared category, which is very useful. In the context of the SDGs, there are a whole range of things we need to spend ODA on that are about international public goods as well, not just about a really tight focus on the very poorest countries.
Jeremy Lefroy
It brings it into perspective at the moment because we are looking at replenishment of IDA for the World Bank, and there is a very strict definition that IDA can only go to middle-income and low-income countries. In fact, IDA is specifically for low-income countries. How would you redefine, in the case of something like IDA, how you would target it?
Aaron Oxley
The lens through which it is useful to look at this is the idea of development effectiveness. If what we are doing is, in terms of, for example, OECD DAC redefinition, bringing in new things that previously did not count, the question you have to ask yourself is: is this effective in reducing poverty and what is the evidence base we have for that impact? For me, those are the two really, really big questions. There are some very interesting things on the table that are good things to happen in the world, but do not necessarily have the evidence base for the kind of impacts that we have for some of the things that have been traditionally DAC coded, like health, for example, where the impact is very clear.
Jeremy Lefroy
Can I finally push you on security and where the line needs to come in terms of defining security expenditure as ODA or not?
Chair
Do you both agree with Girish’s answer on Jeremy’s earlier question on the definition of ODA?
Jonathan Glennie
We do have not a clear line on this, and a lot of us, within Save the Children and elsewhere in the NGO sector, recognise the political reality in this country. There are different political realities. When you are part of an international movement, there are different political realities in other countries, so parts of our movement are really absolutely clear that they are not near the 0.7%, to go back to the question you asked the previous panel. They are absolutely clear that the limited amount of ODA currently being spent should not include peace and security. In the UK context, I personally recognise that it might be difficult for the Government to do 0.7% and then plus. We do have not a line, sorry.
Chair
That is all right, very honest.
Aaron Oxley
I agree with Girish.
Wendy Morton
I would like to take us back to accountability, which I think is where we first started from, on the seven Departments. With a higher proportion of UK aid spending now going to be spent by other Government Departments, how well suited do you feel other Government Departments are to this? Do you think that they have a sufficient level of focus, skills and culture to spend the aid effectively and in accordance with the 2002 Act? Maybe we should start with Girish.
Girish Menon
I agree with what the earlier panellists said about this. DFID has a major role to make sure that the other Departments, which have possibly not stepped into this sphere in the past to the degree to which DFID has, provide the necessary expertise and skills. It is looking at staffing and skillsets. I know there was a previous question on the skillsets required on working on fragile and conflict affected states. That said, the point on accountability has two bits to it: one is the transparency bit, and DFID has always scored very highly on the transparency. We know that other Departments have not scored that much. There is a role for DFID to bring those other Departments up to speed, to those same standards of transparency on which DFID has been rated as very good. Equally, there is a broader question on who is going to hold all these five to seven Departments accountable for the spend. I used to be in DFID in the past, and if I were in DFID I would find it very difficult to say that DFID has the clout, if I may use the word, to hold the Treasury, Defence or the FCO accountable. In my view, it has to be a much higher body of governance that sits across various Departments, possibly under the overview of the Prime Minister, Cabinet Office—and with possibly a role for the IDC as part of the annual accounts and reports—to ask questions, not just of DFID but across all the Departments that are using the ODA money, and possibly a statement by the Prime Minister in Parliament because it is a much larger issue now. If you are really talking about the national interest, it is something the whole Parliament should be interested in, not just those bits that are interested in ODA.
Wendy Morton
Following up from that, would there be an argument that says that could be linked with the SDGs as well—the fact that they are broader than just DFID?
Girish Menon
It is absolutely true. My personal view is that I would have loved to have seen many more references to SDGs in the document. One of my concerns is that the link is quite weak. This document has come less than two months after the SDGs were done. Britain led the world. The Prime Minister himself was a key spokesperson and a champion for the SDGs in the run up to the goals and he has always talked about “leave no one behind”. There is only one reference to “leave no one behind” in the whole document, and that comes in Section 3 and below. That does prompt the question: should that have not been at the very top in terms of framing those? It is only the fourth objective that talks about tackling poverty. Should that not have been right up there? If I can quote UN General Secretary, Ban Ki-moon, he said ours is the first generation that can end poverty; that should have been an opportunity for the UK aid strategy to position the UK as a global leader in poverty reduction, and as a global champion in taking the SDGs forward. There is a slight concern on whether we have missed the opportunity. A lot of it will be in the detail, so it would be great if we can see, as we enter into the implementation phase, those global goals being absolutely reflected in how the ODA money is spent.
Wendy Morton
Jonathan and Aaron, would either of you like to comment on the ability of the other Government Departments to be accountable for the aid spending? You do not have to. I am just giving you the opportunity.
Jonathan Glennie
I am happy to say something. It is a great opportunity, so there is this great line in the strategy that says, “We want to meet our promises to the world’s poor and also put international development at the heart of our national security and foreign policy.” That is the great opportunity, but the flip side of that is the great risk. National security and foreign policy are at the heart of international development. Like I said earlier, there is always a balance. I am the eternal optimist. Aid spending is really, really difficult to get right, simply in terms of effectiveness and then in terms of motive and other incentives being brought to bear. The creation of DFID was a great masterstroke and an important moment in the history of international development in this country, precisely because it gave this kind of powerhouse of poverty-focused spending. It is a great opportunity and this idea that we can become a policy-coherent Government where development is taken into account across the board is a great opportunity. That is what we should be fighting for and this gives us the platform to make that case. Nevertheless, the risks are really quite severe and we have to be clear on them.
Pauline Latham
About a year ago, ICAI released a report criticising DFID’s response to the post-2010 scale up in fragile states. How well placed do you think DFID is to tackle the challenges of delivering on each of the goals of security and prosperity, particularly in fragile states? Where do you think they could improve on the security and prosperity agenda?
Chair
I suggest each of you answers this if you would like to and if there is anything else you would like to say by way of a brief conclusion as well.
Aaron Oxley
Looking at the security and prosperity agenda, one piece of the new strategy, which is quite new and interesting, is bringing in climate and risk insurance mechanisms as a new tool into the humanitarian space. The world is really ripe for that and DFID is poised to lead. That would be an incredibly valuable contribution. I will leave it there.
Jonathan Glennie
I have just a couple of points on how to spend aid well in fragile states. We think it needs to focus on ensuring future shocks are mitigated. I made that point a bit earlier—focusing on the systems and strengthening health security for the long term. There is also this new language that I have learnt recently called “no regrets”, which is about spending on things that you know are really important and even if a crisis does not occur it is still going to be a good investment, rather than a wait-and-see approach, which has not worked. Finally, we focus strongly on education because it is not always the focus in crises; it is health and survival. Our focus at the moment is education. We want to see a new fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises, agreed at the World Humanitarian Summit coming up later this year. Just a fact: conflict-induced displacement now averages 17 years, so a mechanism is required to ensure that entire generations are not robbed of an education by virtue of displacement. This is the big issue facing children in conflict and refugee situations.
Chair
Do you think, Jonathan, we should devote a bigger share of our ODA spending on education?
Jonathan Glennie
I am going to have to go back to my experts on that. I do not know.
Chair
It would be useful if you could and come back to us.
Jonathan Glennie
I will tell you this—and it is a point that Jeffrey Sachs was making in the run up to the SDGs—since 2000 we have seen huge efforts globally on health. It has been transformative, with the global health fund and all the other funds. We have some of those on education, but nowhere near the same size.
Chair
Yes, I agree with you. Thank you for that. Girish?
Girish Menon
DFID is a global leader in international development and has huge political capital across the number of countries in which it works. It has a huge wealth of experience working across countries at different levels of fragility or at different ends of the spectrum. That is something to be hugely leveraged. It has a strong team of governance advisers. It has had people working in conflict. It has the history of working very closely with the FCO on a number of these issues and therefore has the opportunity to combine its work on poverty reduction with the more diplomacy kind of work. Somebody used the term “development diplomacy”; that is the opportunity. A great opportunity that DFID has is to bring women more into the framework of all the peace negotiations and discussions. It is great to see that we have Baroness Anelay, who is leading on women, peace and security. Those kinds of initiatives, together with what Baroness Verma is doing as international champion on domestic violence against women and girls, are some of the initiatives that need to be brought into this agenda. We know that only 8% of women typically participate in peace processes. If we are really talking about peace and security, women have to have a key role. Education of women and girls is absolutely important. Political participation and a greater enabling environment for women to participate actively in these processes is really important. Again, going back to the point that I mentioned earlier about measures of success, it is really important for DFID to define what it means by peace and security and what it wants to achieve through its intervention in peace and security. Unless we have those standards of measurement upfront, right at the very beginning, we will never know what we are judging ourselves against.
Chair
Thank you very much indeed; we have covered a lot of ground. I am really grateful to all three of you for your evidence, which I think will be hugely useful for us as we take forward this piece of work, which is the bread and butter of our work—how the Department allocates its resources. We have touched on, in both evidence panels this morning, some of the risks that are faced at the moment, but also some incredible opportunities to do things better. Very many thanks to all three of you for being with us this morning. Oral evidence: DFID’s Allocation of Resources, HC 533 2