IDC Inquiry into Extreme Poverty and the Sustainable Development Goals
The UK was at the forefront of negotiating the SDGs and will be at the forefront of delivering them. Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, Minister for South and Central Asia, UN and the Commonwealth recently reconfirmed the UK's continued commitment to achieving the goals by 2030 at the UN High Level Political Forum. The new International Development Strategy (IDS) will set out a bold new approach to development that draws on the UK’s unique strengths to maximise our contribution to these goals.
External scrutiny supports the view that UK ODA is well targeted at poverty reduction. UK aid is targeted at countries that need it the most. According to the Centre for Global Development (CGD) the weighted average income[1] of countries receiving UK aid in 2019 was around $5,600; for France it was $8,300; and for Germany it was $9,300.[2] The UK is supportive of, and has continued to meet, the international target to spend 0.15 - 0.2% of GNI in LDCs.
We work closely with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to report data on the UK’s performance against 83% of Global Indicators via the ONS National Reporting Platform. This makes us one of the few countries reporting data on over 70% of the Global Indicators. Outcome Delivery Plans were published for all Government departments on 15 July 2021, highlighting how each department will support the delivery of the Sustainable Development Goals in FY21-22.
The creation of the FCDO unites our development and diplomatic expertise, enabling us to put extreme poverty and sustainable development at the heart of our activity and relationships with development partners, donor allies and key multilaterals across an expanded global network. For example, BE Myanmar pooled humanitarian and political expertise to get lifesaving support to people in desperate need, navigating the political challenges and without giving credibility to the military regime. In the multilateral space, the FCDO rallied the G7 to make more of our collective investment in clean and green infrastructure and overall development finance. This was the first time that the G7 had created a joint Foreign and Development Ministers’ track and was able to achieve greater impact as a result, with discussions on foreign policy interventions and development interventions being held in the same forum.
The IDS will be delivered by a merged FCDO. We will utilise our combined expertise to help countries deliver their own solutions and become self-reliant. This will enable lasting development and poverty reduction, alleviate suffering and tackle its causes, while giving countries the opportunity to pursue economic and social freedoms.
Our new strategy will address poverty by supporting lasting development in and through democratic, free-enterprise economies. The IDS will be informed by the direct and indirect impacts of COVID-19 and climate change, and will respond very clearly to these global challenges.
HMG will continue to adjust its portfolio to support developing countries as they seek to adapt to the challenges of the day such as the impacts of climate change. For example, we will be delivering £11.6 billion of climate finance between 2021 and 2026, double the amount spent in the five years before. This will enable a combination of political action and work on the ground, to make sure that the most vulnerable, including those in extreme poverty, have their needs met by our policy and programme work. This is outlined in the COP26 Presidency Paper ‘The Glasgow Imperative’, which calls for continued learning and change across five areas: i) Building resilience; ii) Effective Risk Management; iii) Transforming Finance; iv) Catalysing Locally Led Action; v) Harnessing the power of nature.
We will maintain our commitment to locally led adaptation in our policy and programming. Our announcement at COP26 of £120 million of support to address the inequalities that make women and girls more vulnerable to climate change in Bangladesh is an example of our support for locally-led approaches.
Global health is a top priority for UK ODA. The FCDO will spend £1.305 billion on global health in 2021/22, the largest allocation among our thematic priorities. The FCDO has sought to make COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics available to people in developing countries, and the UK’s leadership of the Global Pandemic Preparedness Summit in March will build on this. We recognise that weak health systems and wider determinants of health contribute to the spread and impacts (direct and indirect) of the pandemic, and that people living in extreme poverty continue to die from preventable causes. Our Health Systems Strengthening position paper and an Ending Preventable Deaths approach paper, outline how we will approach these challenges. Poverty often exacerbates other forms of marginalisation, including disability, so we are soon to launch our Disability Inclusion Strategy featuring a pillar on inclusive health for the first time.
Through our commitment to educating girls, empowering women and ending violence, the FCDO seeks to address the needs of women and girls in extreme poverty across all sectors and geographies. The Foreign Secretary announced that the FCDO is restoring funding for women and girls to 2020-21 levels, enabling us to reinvigorate our work to educate girls, empower women, and end violence against women and girls.
The OECD DAC Peer Review highlighted that the UK, “continues to be a stalwart champion of gender equality” and cited the What Works to Prevent Violence research programme as a positive example of the UK’s leadership on valuing evidence, learning and knowledge. Rigorous evaluations conducted found that combining economic and social empowerment can reduce violence and achieve significant gains in household economic outcomes for women and girls in poverty. For example, our evaluation of the ‘Living with Dignity’ project in Tajikistan found the proportion of women earning money in the past month, increased four-fold to 78.9%. The FCDO is investing £67.5m in a successor research programme to scale up proven approaches worldwide and continue to invest in rigorous evaluation and learning.
Education is essential for gender equality, lasting poverty reduction, and building prosperous, resilient economies and peaceful, stable societies. Proven initiatives include the Girls’ Education Challenge (GEC). The first phase of the GEC supported quality education for over a million marginalised girls through 37 different projects in 18 countries across Africa and Asia (£355m 2012-2017). The second phase of the GEC is building on this success to help up to 1.5 million marginalised girls benefit from education in 41 projects across 17 countries (£500m, 2017-2025). Assessments conducted in 2021 show that two thirds of girls (813,183 girls[3]) have improved their learning as a result of the GEC. For example, at the start of ACTED's project in Pakistan, only 3% of girls were proficient readers. Midway through the project this has increased to 55%.
The FCDO takes significant steps to review the outcomes of its projects and programmes to ensure funds are well targeted towards tackling extreme poverty. In April 2021 the FCDO launched the Programme Operating Framework (PrOF), which forms the rules and guidance for all ODA programming. The introduction to the PrOF Rules sets out the centrality of poverty reduction, and this is reinforced through the rules themselves (for example on the effective use of evidence in programme targeting in Rule 10).
The PrOF Guides help to ensure effective poverty targeting. For example, the approach to assessing Value for Money in programme design includes a pillar on ‘equity’ to ensure that need is considered alongside efficiency and effectiveness of the intervention. Guidance on Beneficiary Engagement provides advice on how beneficiary engagement can be used to obtain evidence on the collective outcomes of multiple programmes, and improve the reach and effectiveness of assistance.
Concept Notes test the programme’s compliance with the International Development Act. Programme Business Cases are required to set out the impact and outcomes in terms of poverty reduction and the population the programme will target, and to set out the case for FCDO intervention, and the difference it is intended to make.
Programme reviews test how these outcomes and the outputs that will achieve them are being delivered, while also reviewing whether the evidence has changed and the Theory of Change still holds. These reviews are conducted at least annually and published on devtracker.gov.uk. The review also considers changes needed to keep the programme on track to deliver outcomes and scores the intervention.
The FCDO Investment Committee tracks the performance of the programme portfolio through quarterly performance reports. Programmes that are judged to be ‘off-track’ must develop a performance improvement plan. The FCDO’s Better Delivery Department is currently piloting a new Outcome Confidence measure to give more depth to our understanding of programme performance.
The FCDO continuously generates research which is then applied to the design of programmes to ensure the pathways out of poverty reflect best practice. For example, one recent piece of research produced a synthesis of the effective approaches to supporting livelihoods, looking especially at agriculture and social protection, drawing on rigorous external evidence. This and wider research portfolios are being used to support programme design to encourage building sustainable livelihoods.
The FCDO annual 2020-21 report highlights how this evidence translates to our activities and how they have contributed to sustained progress in global poverty reduction and stability. The UK has been at the forefront of the global response to COVID-19, making available public commitments worth up to £1.3 billion of ODA since the crisis began, making us one of the largest donors. This aid has been used to develop and distribute vaccines, support global health and humanitarian response, and support the global economic response.
All UK ODA is spent with the primary intention of benefiting the economic development of the recipient country and improving the welfare of the population. In addition to the international rules for ODA,[4] the UK has also legislated domestically to enshrine the primacy of poverty reduction. Under the International Development Act 2002, we hold ourselves to a higher standard on poverty reduction than the international frameworks on ODA.
We are committed to evaluating our programmes to ensure that they deliver value for money and to generate learning that benefits our future work. The department uses evaluation, monitoring and other evidence tools across our programmes alongside policies for accountability and learning. These are incorporated into programme conceptualisation, design and continuous learning. The FCDO’s sound approach to the use of evidence was acknowledged in the 2020 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Development Cooperation Peer Review, which highlighted that the UK “values evidence and knowledge and has continued to reinforce its strong approach to results, evaluation and learning.”
Following the creation of the FCDO, the Evaluations Unit, DFID Chief Economist Office and the FCO Economics Unit, and the Quality Assurance Unit (which reviews in detail all significant new business cases) have been co-located in a single directorate to ensure that the feedback loop between evaluations, our economic research agenda and the design of new programmes is as tight as possible. We publish all of our evaluations and as well as supporting our own internal work, we see them as a broader public good that helps others learn from our past activities. In the three year period (May 2018-May 2021), the FCDO (and formerly DfID) published 58 independent, quality-assured evaluations products of 46 programmes, policies or portfolios, all of which are available on DevTracker.
The Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI) is a vital part of our challenge and learning ecosystem. Whilst ICAI focuses on examining the impact and value for money of the Government’s development programmes, its overarching remit is also to better support Government learning. HMG welcomed ICAI’s review on How UK Aid Learns. The review highlighted the significant progress Departments have made in building up their aid management capabilities, noting that Departments’ investments in learning are broadly commensurate with the size and complexity of their aid budget.
The coronavirus pandemic had a severe impact on the UK economy and GNI in 2020, and therefore the size of the aid budget decreased. Despite the difficult prioritisation exercise government had to complete mid-year, we continued to focus our efforts on issues where the UK could make the greatest impact.
Due to the sustained economic impact of the pandemic, the UK temporarily reduced its ODA spend to 0.5% from 2021. In 2021/22, we focussed spend on seven global challenges, all of them critical for tackling extreme poverty, where it was assessed the UK can maximise impact and which aligned with the UK’s integrated review priorities: Climate Change and biodiversity; COVID-19 and global health security; Girls’ education; Science, research, technology; Open societies and conflict resolution; Humanitarian preparedness and response; and Trade and economic development. The ODA allocation process took into account considerations of need, including levels of poverty in the countries where FCDO works.
The cut to 0.5% was not a decision taken lightly, but a necessary and temporary reduction, driven solely by current fiscal circumstances. While we know there will be visible real-world impacts on beneficiaries, we have sought to protect the world’s poorest as far as possible by targeting our ODA support to the most fragile and conflict-affected regions of the world. We have scaled back ODA programmes in countries and regions that are better positioned to bounce back from COVID-19.
In addition, the resulting 2021/22 portfolio marks a strategic shift, putting our aid budget to work alongside our diplomatic network, our science and technology expertise and our economic partnerships in tackling global challenges. Evidence shows influencing government policy can have a greater impact on outcomes than just aid spend. Having a merged diplomatic and development network allows us to have a greater reach and impact on reform in partner countries.
The FCDO is wholeheartedly committed to international cooperation and using its convening power. In 2021 we used the UK’s presidency of the G7 to convene the first joint Foreign and Development Ministers’ meetings, and our presidency of COP26 to accelerate action on the issues that matter most. Through the IDS we will be protecting and building on the legacies of these and will set out a bold new vision that shows continued global leadership.
The FCDO will use its convening power and research investments to establish partnerships for development-driven investment, which attract greater funding and expertise from influential private sector actors, or from other donors, for instance through evidence-based impact investing via the Global Innovation Fund. The FCDO’s dedication to research and evidence enable our leadership in international development. We invest several hundred million pounds annually in R&D, to deliver solutions and accelerate progress on the global challenges that matter most for people, planet and prosperity. New and improved technologies, from vaccines to solar power units, are scaled by public bodies and private business to save and enhance millions of lives. Robust evidence on what works also benefits millions, by influencing partner governments’ economic and social policies, FCDO programmes and those of other donors, including billions of pounds of World Bank investments. FCDO research is published as open access and we use opportunities like conferences, webinars and international summits to convene academics and practitioners to share and discuss results.
We will continue to exemplify the UK’s convening power by supporting country platforms in efforts to bring public, private and NGO sectors together to deliver a step change in the scale of clean, honest and reliable financing. The UK’s development finance institution, revamped and launched as British International Investment (BII), will scale investment in sustainable infrastructure and enterprise to provide clean, honest and reliable financing into low and middle-income countries across Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. It will play to the UK’s strengths as a world-leading financial powerhouse, including partnering with capital markets and Sovereign Wealth Funds. With our G7 partners we will support the Partnership for Infrastructure Investment (PII) initiative through the Clean Green Initiative (CGI), which will unlock finance for green growth and provide honest and reliable investment for sustainable infrastructure projects in the developing world, including a new strategic initiative supporting UK-backed investment, loans and expertise.
The FCDO recognises Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) as important partners at the forefront of tackling the biggest challenges. The FCDO is committed to working in partnership with a diverse range of such organisations from across the entire UK, as well as southern based-CSOs.
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[1] Weighted average income is the GNI per capita of recipients, weighted by each of the recipient’s share of overall regionally allocable ODA from that provider.
[2] CGD, December 2021, “Assessing the UK’s ODA Focus on Poverty and Africa”.
[3] As reported in the GEC Annual Report 2021
[4] The OECD’s Development Assistance Committee Directives