Weekly Blog - 14 August 2023 - Overseas Aid
Ending poverty
The UK government is refreshing its approach to overseas development. It has published a White Paper, and is consulting on what its priorities for international development should be. This week Arise’s weekly blog takes a wider look at the role of overseas aid, whilst our weekly action focuses on how we can all feed in to the consultation to shape UK aid for the better.
As Christians we know that God abhors poverty and wants to see everyone, everywhere lifted out of the misery of extreme poverty. We read in the Old Testament that when God’s people entered the Holy Land they were instructed, “If anyone is poor among your fellow Israelites in any of the towns of the land the LORD your God is giving you, do not be hardhearted or tightfisted towards them. Rather be openhanded and freely lend them whatever they need … Give generously to them and do so without a grudging heart … be openhanded toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land” (Deut 15: 4 – 11). Later in the New Testament, the only injunction the apostles laid on Paul when he went out to preach the gospel was that he “should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I had been eager to do all along” (Gal 2: 10).
All nations that have developed successfully and lifted themselves permanently out of poverty have done so though their own efforts, by developing a thriving national economy, and then taxing a proportion of it to fund social spending on essential services like education and healthcare, which help all their citizens. Helping this process to happen faster, more effectively and in an environmentally sustainable way is the focus of Arise’s 4 Shifts Campaign. However, whilst they are going through this process, the international community can play a crucial role in helping to fill the gap by the generous provision of overseas aid to provide basic services and meet immediate development needs, until developing nations reach a stage where they can fully fund these themselves.
Overseas Aid
Overseas aid has been used to provide healthcare, education, clean water and sanitation, emergency relief, crucial infrastructure and multiple other things. To take just one example, the World Health Organisation reports the story of Wezzie Phiri, a health worker in a rural community on the outskirts of Lilongwe, Malawi. Malaria vaccinations in her region have been funded through overseas aid. Since vaccinations were introduced she reports, “It has been very helpful for the community and the facility. Since most of the parents are able to take their children to receive the malaria vaccine, the number of children who get sick with malaria and come here to the health center has really reduced.” She adds, “I have 2 girls. The 1st one, she never received the vaccine. But with my little one, she finished the 4 doses and I can see the difference. With the older one, it used to be a struggle, because every 2 months she used to get sick with malaria. But with the little one, she has finished all the vaccines and it has been good.” [1]
Aid should be delivered at the internationally agreed level of 0.7% of Gross National Income from all developed nations. As Jeffrey Sachs explains in his book The Age of Sustainable Development, “the UN General Assembly in 1970 formally adopted the goal that high-income countries should contribute 0.7 percent of their national income to ODA [Official development Assistance].” Of course, “Aid is not a permanent need or solution. Countries that receive aid can reach a level of income through economic growth whereby they soon ‘graduate’ from the need for aid entirely. China and Korea are two examples of countries that relied on aid when they were poor and then graduated from aid and indeed more recently became significant donor countries. Roughly speaking, graduation from aid can occur when a country passes from low-income to middle-income status.” But until countries reach that point “aid can work” and indeed it is “vital when people are very poor and facing life-or-death challenges, such as malaria, AIDS, safe childbirth, safe water, sanitation, or growing enough food to stay alive.” [2]
Aid should be provided for the sole aim of poverty reduction. It should be focused on the poorest and should not discriminate on the basis of ethnicity, religion, gender, age or in any other way. It should not be ‘tied’ or linked in any way to supporting developed country exports or foreign policy. All aid should be harmonised and coordinated by the national government when it comes into a developing nation, behind a single national development plan. This should be nationally developed and owned, with significant input from poor communities who are directly affected. As far as possible, all aid should be channelled into national budgets and spent by the national government to make it efficient and help reinforce and strengthen the national authorities in their legitimate role. Where concerns about corruption and good governance are so great that they cannot be addressed through rigorous monitoring, then the international community may choose to deliver aid into a nation via alternative routes, such as UN agencies or Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) operating in the field. In which case a lead agency should be identified to play the coordinating role the government would normally play, and to liaise with the national government until the situation has improved and aid can be transferred to be channelled through the national finances. These are principles widely held by the international community. Aid should come in the form of grants not loans to avoid saddling poor countries with future debt crises. Aid commitments should be stable, consistent and committed over multiple years, not short-term ‘stop and start’, to help with financial planning. All aid should be fully transparent, rigorously monitored and independently evaluated and scrutinised to prevent corruption and for effective impact (4 Shifts Report, pg 96 – 97).
Conclusion
Finally, as we have seen, aid should only ever be seen as short-term. It plays a crucial role in meeting an immediate need, but it is no substitution for developing nations building strong and fair economies and taxing them in order to redistribute and meet the basic needs of the poorest. No nation in the world has ever developed as a result of aid alone. Therefore, a sliding scale of phasing down and graduating from aid when it is no longer needed should be in place for all nations. In this way developed and developing nations can work together in partnership to use overseas aid effectively, as part of a wider plan for development. Something that is good for the poorest, and for all of us.
Find out more
Find out more about how God is at work in the world, and the role we all have to play in that work, in the Arise Manifesto. This report is Arise’s big picture, researched, Biblical, holistic and practical vision for a better world. It looks at what the Bible says, and what we can learn from the best data and the world’s leading experts on the five major areas of evangelism, discipleship, social justice, development and the environment. It then draws these lessons together into a practical road map for the changes we need to see in our world, which the Arise movement campaigns to achieve.
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[1] Mothers in Malawi value the first malaria vaccine, WHO, (14 Apr 2023), https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/mothers-in-malawi-value-the-first-malaria-vaccine
[2] Sachs, J., The Age of Sustainable Development, (2015), pg 172, 501