Global Britain: Aid in the National Interest

The Coalition were delighted to partner with The Project for Modern Democracy to celebrate the launch of their new report ‘In the national interest? The past, present and future of UK development policy’.

Ryan Henson, CEO of Coalition for Global Prosperity, welcomed the guests to the webinar. He said investing in development was in the UK’s national interest and highlighted that the Government had promised maximum impact for the UK Aid budget.

“With the FCDO setting a new path for UK Aid, this report from the Project for Modern Democracy was being published at an opportune moment.”

Lord Herbert, Chairman of The Project for Modern Democracy said this report looked more specifically at the history of development policy in the UK. A large part of the report looked at the original reasons why the Department for International Development was first established as a standalone department and examined evidence from overseas where other countries had combined their foreign and development budgets.

The audience then heard from Mavis Owuso-Gyamfi, Executive Vice President for The African Centre for Economic Transformation. Mavis commended the report and said that it identified salient points for the future by looking at past development policy.

It was also very important to invest in innovation, Owuso-Gyamfi said. She stressed investing in a digital economy should also be carefully considered. The UK also used to be at the heart of ensuring coherence between development partners, which would be important in the post-covid world.

Sir Suma Chakrabarti, former President of The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, said this report showed that aid was effective.

On the merger, Chakrabarti said there were some issues – like climate change – where it was helpful to have foreign and development policy working together. Chakrabarti said he liked the fact that the FCDO was pushing the use of multilaterals and said that DFID had become too focussed on thinking the World Bank was the only multilateral that “mattered”.

Chakrabarti, however, said the report underplayed the importance of the agenda for fragile states.

“Development is more than just aid, and Britain’s focus on developing countries should be broader than aid.”

Finally, the audience heard from Tom Tugendhat MP, Chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.

Tugendhat said one of the errors that had been made was viewing aid as separate from other policy.

He said the merger was therefore important. The Integrated Review tried to address the problem of linkages. There were separate budgets for Whitehall departments he said, which didn’t work.

“All MPs were elected in 2019 on a commitment to spend 0.7 percent of GNI on overseas aid.”