Scotland-Malawi Relationship

Part of Parliamentary Candidates: Barriers for Women – in Westminster Hall at 5:18 pm on 13 September 2017.

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Photo of Rory Stewart Rory Stewart Minister of State (Foreign and Commonwealth Office) (Joint with the Department for International Development), Minister of State (Department for International Development) (Joint with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office) 5:18, 13 September 2017

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Chope. I pay tribute to David Linden for introducing this debate, but above all I pay tribute to the Scotland Malawi Partnership—genuinely one of the most unique, remarkable, interesting and human interweavings of two nations anywhere in the world.

Right hon. and hon. Members have spoken powerfully about those links. Stephen Gethins spoke about the links between the University of St Andrews, the University of Edinburgh and the University of Aberdeen in maternal healthcare, obstetrics and specialist tropical diseases. Hugh Gaffney spoke about responses in childbirth.

That is all part of a pattern of a dense interweaving of different types of interaction. Mr Carmichael spoke about interactions in music. My hon. Friend Colin Clark spoke about the relationships that exist in exchanges. The hon. Members for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens) and Edinburgh South (Ian Murray) spoke about school partnerships and connections. Everything that has been said, including by the hon. Member for Glasgow East about Mary’s Meals and by Patrick Grady about the personal experience of his extraordinary year spent teaching in Malawi, shows the genius of the Scotland Malawi Partnership. Those are just a dozen out of 1,300 different examples of Scottish individuals, small Scottish charities and Scottish institutions linking to Malawi.

There are three things from which we can learn. The first is, to use a horrible jargon phrase, the civic multiplier—the way in which the Scotland Malawi Partnership, with a relatively modest amount of money, can draw on all the institutions to create a much richer partnership and be more than the sum of its parts. The second element, which has come through time and again in today’s speeches, is mutual respect. Everyone who spoke talked a great deal about equality and about how we can learn as much from Malawi as it can learn from us. Finally, there is the genius of co-ordination and connections. Since 2005 the work of the Scotland Malawi Partnership has been not to create the connections, but to find them and mine them—to draw them out of the soil and reveal to us that thick web of connections between two nations, essentially putting Malawians on the board. That is a very important part of the work of the Scotland Malawi Partnership.

Along with the Scotland Malawi Partnership and, indeed, the good work done by the Scottish Government in Malawi, the Department for International Development is also a major player there. In financial terms it is a considerably larger player, as we spend probably 12 times more a year. We are doing something slightly different. We pay a huge tribute to the Scotland Malawi Partnership, but we recognise that there is space for other things.

We work on a systems level. We have been working since the 1960s, and during that time we have spent well over £1 billion on trying to transform the country’s fundamental governmental systems. That means addressing health systems, not merely through the ways that we have been discussing, such as university exchanges, but by getting into the details of how drugs are bought, procured and moved into clinics, and of how to deal with HR mechanisms of health clinics. It means thinking about enrolments in education. Almost every boy and girl in Malawi now goes to primary school, but the question is how we move on and think about quality. As for agriculture, Malawi is heavily dependent on maize, which is a challenge. There are not always markets for maize and the Malawian Government are currently reluctant to allow people to export it. There is a question not only about transforming the markets for it, but about how to diversify into other crops.

There are therefore two different relationships: the very rich one between the constituencies of those right hon. and hon. Members who have spoken, the Scottish people and Malawi; and the bigger relationship with the British Government. What can we learn from each other? Perhaps I may modestly and bravely suggest things for the Scotland Malawi Partnership to consider. It has been an incredibly successful partnership, but two or three things occur to me. The first is whether the wonderful friendship, partnership and diplomatic relations that have been developed could occasionally be used to challenge the Malawian Government about uncomfortable issues, such as corruption. Can the relationships be used to talk about that—or about family planning? The Malawian Government have brought the fertility rate in Malawi down from 5.7, but the average family size is still 4.5 children. That is a major challenge for a country that is already densely populated. Is the Scotland Malawi Partnership prepared to speak about that?

Liz McInnes raised some recent surveys about the Scottish Government’s work in Malawi. Indeed, we in DFID could reflect on some of those questions about innovation and sustainability, and how the human, personal connections, which are often really good, can be sustained into the future. How can we achieve structural transformation and get beyond supporting 300 people in a particular place today to changing the Malawian Government system, so that they could do that themselves?

Two areas of learning that have emerged for the Department: the questions of the double taxation treaty and of visas. My interventions have probably revealed my views on the double taxation treaty, but I think we can do more on visas. Progress has been made. We have now identified a designated UK Border Force officer, who will focus on Malawi visas to try to facilitate the Scotland Malawi Partnership. That may save the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland from having to spend every Saturday talking to the UK Border Agency. However, there is more that can be done.

More broadly, the big lesson from the Scotland Malawi Partnership may be for the Department for International Development itself. The Scotland Malawi Partnership shows us a great deal. It shows us the powerful example of a man such as David Hope-Jones and what leadership can mean. In a pretty remarkable achievement, this man has succeeded in ensuring that 15 Members of Parliament appear to have read in detail the 1955 double taxation treaty, the 1978 amendment to it and all 16 of its articles. I am delighted that they show such authority and detailed knowledge. That shows David Hope-Jones’s extraordinary success in communicating with Parliament.

More seriously, at the centre of the Scotland Malawi Partnership is its use of the idea of history and identity—something that perhaps the United Kingdom could be more confident in doing. We have heard a great deal about David Livingstone, but this relationship is not one that could necessarily have been taken for granted. Like all relationships, it was nurtured and developed. There was no inevitability about the relationship being between Scotland and Malawi. Chris Law could have made a powerful argument that the natural relationship might be between Dundee and Calcutta. There are many profound relationships between Scotland and many different parts of the world. Malawi was chosen for good reasons, and over time, through talking about it, that relationship has become more powerful, more interesting and more human. There is a great deal we can learn from that.

There is also a precedent point: as the world changes, as African economies grow and as China and India come in, the amount of British money going into Africa will form a smaller proportion of those economies. Learning that we cannot necessarily do everything, and that we may want to take a leaf out of the book of the Scotland Malawi Partnership and learn how to operate at a smaller, more human scale in certain designated countries, may be important for the British Government.