UK Future of Aid Inquiry Submission

I am the Co-Executive Director of the Lead-Acid Battery Recycling Initiative, a charitable project that seeks to reduce lead poisoning in Low and Middle-Income Countries. Prior to founding LABRI, I worked in a senior leadership role at a US-registered nutrition charity, Fortify Health. 

I write as a leader with experience in evidence-based international development. Throughout my work, I have been consistently struck by the strength and clarity of the evidence supporting direct cash transfers as a highly effective intervention for reducing poverty and improving well-being; large-scale randomised evaluations have repeatedly shown that unconditional cash transfers increase consumption, improve food security, and support long-term gains in income and well-being with very low overhead costs (Haushofer & Shapiro, 2016; GiveDirectly Evaluation Synthesis, 2022). Meta-analyses covering diverse contexts confirm these results across settings (Egger et al., 2019).

The UK Government should use direct cash transfers as a benchmark for value for money in aid spending for two key reasons:

1. Continuing need: The need for direct cash transfers is also huge and shows no signs of disappearing; more than 700 million people worldwide live in extreme poverty (World Bank, 2022). The FCDO could plausibly spend its entire overseas aid budget in cash transfers and still not address this need, which means that direct cash transfers are a plausible alternative to any programme that the FCDO pursues.
2. Strength of evidence: Cash transfers are one of the most widely-studied international development interventions.

If the government is considering funding an intervention, it should satisfy itself that each pound spent generates at least as much benefit for poor households as sending that pound directly to them. Where strong evidence of even higher effectiveness exists, the government may reasonably set a higher threshold—for example, requiring that funded programmes deliver at least twice the impact of unconditional cash transfers. This is consistent with the Treasury’s Green Book emphasis on opportunity cost: if funds could produce more impact if spent differently, it is wasteful not to do so.

Recommendation 1: The UK Government should introduce unconditional cash transfers as a default benchmark intervention. If a programme cannot demonstrate higher impact per pound than the benchmark, funding should default to the benchmark.

Recommendation 2: The FCDO should require each programme business case to explicitly quantify cost-effectiveness relative to either:

a)     Providing equivalent cash directly to target households; or

b)     Funding the most effective known intervention in that sector (e.g., malaria prevention in health; structured pedagogy programmes in education).

This approach would:

a)     eliminate weak programmes that cannot justify their overhead or theory of change;

b)     strengthen accountability, transparency, and cross-sector comparability; and

c)      ensure taxpayers’ money delivers the highest possible benefit to the people the UK seeks to support.

Scaling Proven, Highly Cost-Effective Programmes (“Smart Buys”)

Once cost-effectiveness thresholds are established, the UK should actively prioritise and scale a limited number of exceptionally high-impact programmes—sometimes referred to as “Smart Buys” or “best buys.” These are interventions that consistently outperform cash transfers by a substantial margin, supported by robust evidence from multiple trials and implementation studies.

For example:

a)     Malaria prevention (e.g., seasonal malaria chemoprevention and bed nets) has been shown to save lives at costs far below most health interventions (White et al., 2023; GiveWell, 2024).

b)     Structured pedagogy programmes significantly improve foundational literacy and numeracy at very low cost (Piper et al., 2018; J-PAL Education Evidence Review, 2020).

c)      The combined simplified protocol for treating acute malnutrition has demonstrated high recovery rates at an estimated cost of around $918 per child with strong scalability advantages (Bailey et al., 2020; International Rescue Committee, 2021).

These interventions represent the top ~1% globally in cost-effectiveness (Copenhagen Consensus, 2014; Disease Control Priorities, 3rd ed., 2018; GiveWell Cost-Effectiveness Models, 2024).

The FCDO is expected to reduce aid spending by nearly £3 billion by 2027. Under fiscal constraint, not prioritising high-value interventions means delivering dramatically less real-world impact. The UK once had a global reputation as a leader on value-for-money; since the FCDO merger, this reputation has weakened. Re-establishing rigorous cost-effectiveness discipline would restore credibility and maximise the poverty-reduction value of each pound spent.

Recommendation 3: FCDO should focus its portfolio around a small number of highly cost-effective, standardised, scalable programmes—while reducing spending on bespoke, consultancy-heavy programme design.

This would direct more money to recipients rather than intermediaries, enable faster scale-up in response to crises, reduce overheads and fragmentation, and deliver clearer, measurable results.

Conclusion

To align UK aid with both taxpayer expectations and the moral imperative to reduce global poverty effectively, the government should:

1. Use unconditional cash transfers as the baseline for cost-effectiveness.
2. Require programme business cases to demonstrate impact greater than cash.
3. Concentrate funding on a small set of proven, highly cost-effective interventions.

This approach would ensure the UK delivers demonstrably greater development impact, strengthens accountability, and re-establishes the UK as a global leader in evidence-driven, value-for-money development.