Clause 1 - Development Assistance
International Development Bill
12:00 pm
Mr Andrew Rowe (Faversham and Mid Kent, Conservative)
I rise to support the amendments, and shall start with amendment No. 1. It is vital that we do not, either intentionally or inadvertently, create problems. For example, a country may make considerable progress, and be within discernible distance of becoming independent of development systems. It would, by definition, not be among the poorest of the poor, so it would be extraordinary to withdraw international assistance just at the point when it was likely to become a success. I hope that the Minister will reassure me that there is nothing in the Bill that will prevent the continuation of a programme of assistance to make a country self-sustaining when it ceases to be among the poorest of the poor.
It is not clear whose poverty we are talking about. Let me give an extreme example of a scholarship for one young man or woman. That would ensure the training required to become immensely successful, thereby reducing the person's poverty, but it might do nothing for the country from which the person came.
I know how the Secretary of State feels about that situation. I think that she goes too far and undermines higher education in countries that desperately need it by her insistence that it is only for the elite. I have seen the university in Rwanda, and believe that it is a mistake that it should be allowed to continue in that state because it is believed that only the elite enjoy such services in a corrupt society. Students are desperate to learn agricultural and other skills. Nevertheless, we need to look carefully at whose poverty we are talking about.
Some of my colleagues on the Select Committee and I went to a Cambodian village. We were taken there by an NGO, which was operating an excellent project, the main thrust of which was to help peasant families with very poor land and too little land to sustain a family to make more of what they had. It came as a rude shock to discover that about 44 per cent. of those living in that village had no land at all. The development assistance was well targeted and effectively implemented not to the poorest of the poor, but to the stratum above. That is an important issue.
We must make it clear that under amendment No. 1, which would insert the words ``directly or indirectly'', indirect assistance would include helping NGOs, but we should be much tougher and insist that they provide evidence that they are giving senior positions to people from the countries concerned. Some NGOs are good at that, but some are not. Some of the countries that shame us with the amount of assistance that they give--for example, some of the Scandinavian countries--are poor at involving indigenous people, and a huge proportion of the aid provided by northern countries to southern countries is returned to their nationals in salaries, and so on. That is an improper use of money and long out of date.
A colleague on a project in Zimbabwe, who was once an ex-pat in Ethiopia, told me that when he was working on a Scandinavian project--it could have been a British project--in Ethiopia, an ex-pat specialist would fly in for a fortnight to provide the benefit of his advice. The Scandinavian ex-pat treated my colleague as if he too were an Ethiopian illiterate who required assistance, when he was an ex-pat working for an NGO because of his own expertise.We must give serious consideration to channelling our aid through people who live in the countries concerned and not just through ex-pats.
I said on Second Reading that we should have an effective accounting mechanism to examine progress. I have no doubt that there is an accounting mechanism. DFID has been good at monitoring whether money is being wasted, so I am sure that that is well accounted for, but how do we determine whether the money is effectively spent? Some client countries of DFID have made nugatory progress over the years. They may be good reasons for that, but is it wise to pump money into countries where very little progress can be demonstrated when the same amount of money given to another country might achieve a great reduction in poverty? Those are difficult issues.
The Bill implies that money should not be ineffectively spent, but should be spent in places where poverty can be reduced. That raises questions, to which I am sure the Minister will refer when he responds, concerning the other pressures on development assistance. In addition to the poor, there is also the question of political and humanitarian pressures. Should one continue to pour money into, say, Nepal, where there is little evidence of serious success, or should one invest in a country for which the statistics are improving sharply, even though to do so would be difficult politically?
Good government is central to, among other things, the new sector-wide approach. As the International Development Committee Chairman powerfully argued, if we do not take care we shall swiftly return to the bad old days of giving money to Governments. Such a newcomer am I to this field that it was not until I visited the World Bank with the Select Committee that I understood the remarkable concept of fungibility, which I now feel as if I have known for my entire life. The idea is simple: if one provides a Government with money to buy, say, a brand new hospital, money is freed up to buy machine guns or fast cars for Cabinet Ministers. In other words, although UK taxpayers' money in theory buys a hospital, it can be argued that in practice it buys six Alfa Romeos.