Simon O’Connell :
With wealthy nations still struggling to balance their books after the financial crisis, the money they spend on foreign aid is coming under increasing scrutiny. Traditionally generous donors such as Sweden are rethinking how they allocate their aid resources. In the UK, the aid budget is protected by law to keep spending at 0.7% of gross national income; but this commitment has come under renewed attack. Yes, we spend taxpayers’ money on foreign aid – and we save lives.
For those of us who work in international aid, this criticism can be frustrating. We normally respond with a robust defence against specific claims and, rightly, promote what aid can achieve. But perhaps we should welcome a discussion about the UK’s commitment to aid spending, because it is important.
I write this from the Syria-Turkey border, where my organisation, Mercy Corps, has been running the largest organisation-led cross-border relief operation for the past five years.
At times we’ve been reaching 1.3 million people a month in more than 100 locations inside Syria – including life-saving food aid for people in Aleppo. Increasingly, where the conflict permits, we are moving to longer-term approaches to help Syrians, especially aid that bolsters businesses and promotes sustainability. We focus on Syria’s youth population, and support thousands of young people in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, helping them to cope with trauma and get education, training and jobs.
A significant proportion of our funding comes from the UK’s Department for International Development (DfID); we are receiving £27m to deliver a two-year programme in Syria. This work is complex and risky. We have incredibly brave, dedicated staff and an extraordinary network of courageous partners.
It has never been more urgent to engage positively with the world’s challenges. There are more displaced people now than at any time since the second world war – 60 million people, half of them children.
More than a million people have fled to Europe in the past 12 months. The average length of conflict-induced displacement is now 17 years. We are seeing multiple protracted crises, caused by conflict, poverty, inequality and weak governance, which in turn drive global instability and migration. Encountering these challenges is not a choice – they are real and the UK cannot hide from them. The UK is a leader in using its aid budget to tackle these issues. It is an essential part of our global role.
This work is difficult, dangerous and at times frustratingly cumbersome. We should be honest about that. A failing of the aid sector has been to oversimplify the work we do in our communications with the public. In many ways the existing aid system is broken – it was designed after the second world war around UN institutions that have been criticised for failing to adapt.
Before taking up the post of executive director, I worked in eastern the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where about 2.7 million people remain displaced more than 20 years after the Rwandan genocide. We are implementing a £38m project in the east of the country, funded by DfID, to provide water and sanitation to more than 1.5 million people.
In a country with such weak governance and extensive conflict, this is extraordinarily complex and high risk. It takes time and costs money. Sometimes we take two steps forward and one back. Sometimes we don’t achieve all our aims. When that happens, reviews are undertaken and people are held to account.
On other occasions we exceed expectations and transform the lives of thousands.
It is not easy, but the returns are worth it. It is this kind of project that has contributed globally to cutting deaths in children under five by more than half in the past 25 years. In our view, the correct response to challenges with programmes is not to cut the aid budget, but to learn how to do things better.
Mercy Corps falls into the category of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) but that misrepresents the work we do. We’ve set up commercial micro-finance initiatives that have disbursed more than £1bn to people otherwise unable to borrow for their businesses or insure against disasters, in countries including Indonesia, Haiti, Philippines and Niger. We’ve started social ventures, we partner with businesses and we work with municipal governments in countries such as Lebanon as they cope with the influx of Syrians.
We must do better at showing the true costs and complexities of the work we do. We make mistakes. We take risks. Sometimes we fail. We learn. We are rightly expected to account for everything we spend. We are held to account, and rightly so. We spend taxpayers’ money. We spend your money. We should be honest with you that this is difficult work and that the sector needs reform.
But this work is vital and walking away from the 0.7% aid commitment is not the answer; learning how to do things better is. In today’s multi-polar world, isolationism won’t work. The issues facing people in Syria and eastern DRC are our issues, too. Failing to address them is a failure for all of us.
(Simon O’Connell is the Executive Director of Mercy Corps Europe).
