Communicate Aid by Stating Outcomes

Hi there,

When communicating aid, trust and clarity is key to gain the trust of the public. The best way to achieve this is through the most relevant outcomes, that is lives saved and dramatically improved, reinforced by robust evidence. As a citizen it is more convincing to read “150,000 children have been protected from dying due to malaria” rather than abstract concepts such as "strengthened capacity-building of entity X".

People respond best not to abstract numbers, but to concrete examples of progress: parents who no longer have to see their children die in infancy, villages where malaria deaths have been eradicated, and evidence on how many lives have been transformed.

The first step is to make success visible. UK aid has supported some of the most effective global health efforts in history. The UK has been one of the main funders of Gavi, which has helped vaccinate more than a billion children and prevent over a million deaths worldwide. It has supported the campaign to eliminate trachoma, which puts millions of children at risk of blindness in poorer countries, and can be prevented through a simple course of antibiotics that costs less than a cup of coffee. Deworming programmes, also backed by UK aid, have improved the health, school attendance, and long-term earnings of hundreds of millions of children at a cost of only a few pence per treatment.

Communicating this effectively means being clear about how a small amount of our resources can transform lives around the world. Hundreds of millions of people still live on less than £2 a day, in conditions most people in the UK can hardly imagine. One pound spent on childhood vaccination yields between £20 and £50 in economic benefits; just a few pounds can protect a child from blindness. The evidence is clear that well-directed aid can reduce poverty and save millions of lives in the world’s poorest places, and the UK should make these stories known.

Vikram