Britain can be justly proud of the impact our aid spending has had – and continues to have – around the world. It has saved lives, improved livelihoods, boosted economies and helped tackle climate change.
Our work was pivotal in combating Ebola in Sierra Leone. The UK significantly shaped the response to the Syria refugee crisis. We were a leading actor in the design of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. And all this was just during my time as international development secretary between 2012 and 2016. I’m sure others in the same role could add their own examples. Our approach has conferred on Britain a level of soft power that enables us to shape diplomatic arguments – something many of our partners have envied.
In a nutshell, the UK is good at international development and has been highly successful in delivering it. The investment cases for our international development spending were among the most detailed and comprehensive I dealt with in government. They underwent independent scrutiny, both within the department, through the Quality Assurance Unit and externally from the usual Parliamentary Select Committee and the Independent Committee for Aid Impact. Plus, of course, the media.
We targeted our aid more carefully to have the biggest impact, and away from those countries such as India and China that are increasingly able to fund their own development. For transparency, we even published every Department for International Development business case online.
By and large, we invested effectively, targeted effectively and influenced effectively. Yet despite this success, the striking retrenchment of aid spending – not just by Britain but by others, most dramatically the United States with the wholesale dismantling of USAID – has shown that the argument for aid has been steadily lost across western democracies.
Over the past five years, UK aid spending has dropped from 0.7 per cent of GDP to 0.5 per cent, with the current government planning to reduce it to 0.3 per cent by 2027. By one recent calculation, global spending on overseas development aid has dropped by as much as 22 per cent compared with 2023. How has it gone so badly wrong?
Towards ‘aid realpolitik’
Delivering aid effectively isn’t enough any more. The moral case for aid is no longer sufficient. There is an ‘aid realpolitik’ that must now be confronted by everyone in the aid community. Fundamentally, the argument for aid has not kept up with the changing political landscape. We are in a world where more and more people in aid-donor democracies feel they themselves have been left behind. They feel their own lives aren’t being developed, let alone anyone else’s in a wider world.
The powerful African proverb ‘If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together’ applies to us as well. Arguably, we’re finding it increasingly hard to ‘go together’ internationally because we haven’t gone together sufficiently at home. It’s a tough message to have to confront, but in my day-to-day life now dedicated to working on the ground to drive stronger social mobility and equality of opportunity, for many communities it feels like each new generation is worse off than the last.
Effort and reward in Britain have become steadily uncoupled – and people are rightly angry. They want this fixed first. There has always been broad-based support for, and pride in, Britain’s humanitarian efforts. But for the wider international development work, we need to recognize that a sustainable international development strategy overseas for the UK is intrinsically linked to finding a sustainable ‘development’ strategy at home. It is crucial to unlock the political bandwidth that aid investment needs.
Any other approach risks perpetuating the sorts of challenges to aid spending we are seeing today. That’s aid realpolitik. We have to both make progress at home in equality of opportunity, while better demonstrating how international development is good for our people as well, whether on economic, security or diplomatic grounds, or even in relation to tackling our migration problem at its source.
Cross government partnerships
There are approaches that the UK could use more overtly to succeed in this ‘aid realpolitik’ world. During my time in the Department for International Development, we moved towards ‘whole government’ partnerships with strategically important countries – known as ‘compacts’. These agreements enabled us to find common ground on development needs for investment. Some of these compacts were in relation to economic development, for example with Jordan, where British efforts to support business investment went hand in hand with domestic government regulations that made employment easier for refugees. It was a simple recognition that we could do more if they could do more.
Other compacts supported those countries hosting refugee and migrant communities, for example in parts of Africa, such as Ethiopia. If we could help them provide work and opportunities for those refugees and migrants, it benefited the host country and reduced pressures for onward migration. Whether on economic development or migration, we should be finding these win-win areas for strategic aid cooperation. We shouldn’t be squeamish about it. Perhaps it’s a case of ‘tough on migration, tough on the causes of migration’.
Regardless of how much aid Britain believes it can afford, we need to do a far better job of proving the strategic value of the money we spend on international development. The UK government has reduced aid, diverting it to defence spending, but it is less clear whether ministers will look at a much wider approach. Joining up our aid strategy with our domestic strategy in a more sophisticated and obvious way is crucial for its longer-term sustainability.