Where next for UK Government on aid and development?
The UK Government’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) is responsible for the UK’s spending on international development, funding projects to help people living in poverty across the world, and to respond to humanitarian crises. The department is currently drafting a “White Paper”, to set out the priorities that will guide the way they allocate their funding. To help shape this, they have consulted with the public - asking 15 questions about how the UK should best spend aid money.
The UK Government has made clear that no new budget would be forthcoming. This is important, because recent years have seen swingeing cuts to the aid budget, which were implemented at such speed that projects were cancelled in the middle of their implementation, causing lasting damage to the people and communities they were meant to be helping, as well as denting the reputation of the UK as a trustworthy development partner across the world.
Water Witness International submitted responses that emphasised four key points:
1. Reinstating overseas development assistance (ODA)
The main obstacle to the UK supporting genuine development -and rehabilitating its reputation internationally as a reliable partner to ODA recipients, and a leader in the fight against climate change- is the low level of budget allocated.
The international benchmark for spending on ODA, agreed way back in 1970, is 0.7% of GDP (approximately 1.5p for every 1 pound the government spends should be allocated to ODA). This is itself too low to meet the Sustainable Development Goals’ targets. But the UK government is committed to remaining below even this low bar, and continuing to breach their own law that sets 0.7% as a baseline budget for international development. They have instead set a cap of 0.5% of GDP on ODA.
Money for climate change mitigation and adaptation, which is, by international agreement at the UN climate conference (COP) in Copenhagen in 2009, supposed to be new and additional to the ordinary aid budget, is consistently counted within the UK’s 0.5%. This needs to be addressed urgently as it means the UK is falling far short of public commitments on aid and climate funding.
2. Reinstating water resources management (WRM), and drinking water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), as key planks of their international development work.
The UK government has laid out four goals for their aid budget:
· Support partner countries to grow their economies sustainably
· Provide women and girls with the freedom they need to succeed
· Step up life-saving humanitarian assistance, and work to prevent the worst forms of human suffering
· Take forward work on climate change, nature and global health.
Each of these goals is utterly dependent on WRM and WASH. Economic growth requires the growth of industry. All industry requires water as an input at some level, and many of the industries that low income countries are relying on for their economic growth - textiles, agriculture, mining, manufacturing - either require a lot of water as an input, produce a lot of water pollution as an output, or both. Green, sustainable economic growth cannot be achieved without better water resources management in low-income countries.
To be free to succeed and reach their potential, women and girls need safe water in their homes and in health care centres, and safe sanitation in their homes, schools and places of work. Nothing could be more fundamental. When water is not available at home, it is predominantly women and girls who fetch it, at the cost of education and work. The UN estimates 200 million hours are wasted by women and girls every day in fetching water. The time and effort of fetching water means that the quantity available for use to keep themselves and their homes clean is limited, which has consequences for health and livelihoods when people must limit how much they use for drinking, washing, cleaning, irrigating or supplying livestock.
When sanitation is not available at home, people are forced to defecate in the open. They risk ill-health if they try to limit doing so by restricting their food and water intake, and they risk disease and personal safety when they must go. Open defecation can also lead to outbreaks of deadly diseases such as cholera that can spread extremely quickly.
Humanitarian assistance always includes reaching the population with clean water and sanitation. Floods commonly bring sanitation-related diseases such as cholera, droughts take away drinking water, conflict displaces large numbers of people to places without the infrastructure to supply basic services.
And the climate crisis is a water crisis. Climate change is felt through water – whether emergencies such as floods, droughts or storms, or ‘slow crises’ of changing rainfall patterns and sea-level rise. Adapting to climate change means managing the water resources countries have, and investing in the water and sanitation services that they will need to ensure basic services are provided and sustained as the climate changes.
3. A whole of government approach
International development is only a small part of the UK government’s activities. Too often, objectives for the aid budget are undercut by business as usual elsewhere. Whether that’s in subsidies for polluting industries that cause climate change, foreign policies that exacerbate humanitarian crises, or legal frameworks that support the use of tax-havens to shift profits from low income countries and avoid taxes.
The UK government was a founding signatory to the Fair Water Footprints declaration at COP 26 in Glasgow, which commits signatories to ensuring that water used in supply chains to provide us with the clothes, food and tech we consume, doesn’t affect local communities and ecosystems negatively. This means that the government should be using their regulatory powers to ensure that products sold in the UK come with:
- Zero water pollution
- Sustainable and equitable withdrawal and water use
- Full access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene for workers
- Zero nature degradation
- Climate resilience built in, particularly for floods and droughts
4. Supporting accountability for water
There is a growing consensus that sustainable improvements in WRM and WASH are dependent on strengthening the systems for managing and delivering water services. Otherwise, taps and toilets fall into disrepair, water abstraction is unmanaged and can therefore be overused and unfairly distributed, and pollution is uncontrolled.
The way to improve systems for managing and delivering water services effectively is accountability- ensuring each part of the system has, and is held to, a clear mandate and responsibilities. Accountability is when each part of the system feels greater pressure to deliver their mandate, information about progress is more complete, and data is used to make better decisions. Failings in the system are identified and responded to, and the sector as a whole is better able to raise the essential finances needed, as it is seen as a worthwhile investment, and money isn’t lost to corruption and inefficiencies.
UK aid money should be used to strengthen accountability in the water sector.
In particular we should support citizens to demand accountability from authorities – across the world, activists and ordinary citizens have raised service levels by drawing attention to failing systems and demanding better. These efforts provide excellent value for money, as even with a small amount of investment, citizens’ movements can bring about huge impacts on the sector.
Overall, its time for the UK government to step up its efforts on aid, development and climate action- joining up policy across government departments so development impact is not undermined by the policies and actions of trade, foreign policy, energy or other government departments. Adequate funding must be allocated to ensure a minimum of 0.7% of GDP is ODA spend, plus a separate budget for climate finance commitments. And water must be put at the centre of the four pillars of the aid and development strategy- there can be no economic development, gender justice, humanitarian response or climate resilience without appropriate water resource management and accountability to those most affected.
For more on how Water Witness International is working on aid policy, see our evidence to the House of Commons International Development Committee and our comments on aid cuts in the press.
The Guardian:
The Telegraph:
Devex:
https://www.devex.com/news/uk-aid-cuts-contributed-to-major-cholera-epidemic-says-ngo-104892