Hansard

The member is right in saying that the constant challenge in international development is to ensure that we both respond to immediate need and think about long-term international development. The countries that we are working in have ambitions like any other country, and in the future they will be in a position to be more self-sufficient than they are. However, that does not take away from the urgent need to help them now.

Although what we do in Malawi is for Malawi’s sake, in many cases our partnership working has created real benefits for Scottish people. In that context, I am delighted to announce over £1 million in matched funding, over five years, for the Blantyre-to-Blantyre clinical research project. Observant people will be aware that there is a Blantyre in both Malawi and Scotland. We are linking clinicians at the University of Glasgow with clinicians in Malawi in order to study the increasing incidence of cardiac and inflammatory disease in the Malawian population, but the results of that collaboration will contribute to research into the Glasgow effect and studies into the health of the Scottish population. As with all our work in Malawi, the project is being carried out under the terms of the bilateral co-operation agreement, ensuring that our work dovetails with the Government’s wider priorities and long-term vision.

Our manifesto promised to renew our agreement with the Malawi Government and we will progress that in the coming year. We will also continue to ring fence £3 million a year for initiatives in Malawi.

As I mentioned, the mobilisation of Scottish civil society is central to all this work, and the organisations involved include the Scotland Malawi Partnership. Recent years have also seen large civil society involvement in fair trade activities. In 2013, Scotland became the second country in the world to achieve fair trade nation status.

Scotland’s capacity to help the developing world is not limited to one country. In 2008, the Government added several other countries to our programme across sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia, and increased the international development fund to £9 million, with a global footprint across seven countries. The work has received invaluable support from the Network of International Development Organisations in Scotland—NIDOS—which has supported the growth of that sector and enabled our sectoral colleagues to come together to share best practice.

In Rwanda, the Scottish Government is working with Tearfund to deliver a project called ending poverty one village at a time. It aims to empower communities to end poverty, hunger and disease through developing self-help groups and focusing on those needs identified by people on the ground.

In Zambia, through our funding of the Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund’s Kulima programme, we are able to ensure that the project can help to address the impact of soil degradation by working with more than 1,300 smallholder farmers to increase food production levels. The result has been an improvement in the fertility and the resilience of their soil to climate change.

In Pakistan, the Scottish Government has provided £670,000 from the international development fund to run highly regarded scholarship programmes. The funding will enable 400 women from disadvantaged backgrounds to study for masters degrees and more than 3,000 children from disadvantaged backgrounds to complete one year of primary and secondary schooling.

The past couple of years have been a good time to reflect on our international development work and to think about how to maximise its impact. In November 2015, we celebrated the 10th anniversary of that work.

The First Minister has announced that the intended framework for domestic implementation of the global goals will be the national performance framework. To align our work with the commitment to the global goals, we launched a nationwide consultation on our international development policy. I believe that our new strategy will achieve those ends. We have brought greater geographic focus to our work by reducing the number of countries that we work in. Malawi, Rwanda and Zambia will form our new sub-Saharan African project base, and we will continue our engagement with Pakistan through our highly successful focus on scholarships for educational benefit. Those are four countries with which Scotland shares extensive historic and contemporary links and where the Government can focus its efforts for maximum impact.

In working to the spirit of the global goals, we will concentrate our efforts as a Government on four distinct priorities. The first of those priorities is to encourage new and historic relationships with the developing world. The second is to empower our partner countries and increase their capacity for development. The third is to engage the people of Scotland across all levels of society in the process of achieving global sustainable development. Finally, we will enhance our global citizenship by showing leadership on tackling poverty and injustice at home and abroad.

I turn briefly to the amendments. I am happy to support the Labour amendment. I have looked carefully at the Conservative amendment and there is much in it to commend. I am happy to confirm that we work closely with the United Kingdom on many projects and to agree with the points that are made about promoting the rights of marginalised minorities. Indeed, the new strategy embeds human rights in all our development work, and I am happy to confirm our commitment to eliminate all discrimination and to work actively for the inclusion of women and girls, the disabled, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people and other marginalised groups.

However, I make it clear to members that we support the beyond aid agenda and are implementing it. That means that we still consider aid programmes to be a vital component of sustainable development efforts in the meantime. That is why we have maintained our development assistance funding stream in addition to an investment stream. Perhaps unintentionally, the Conservative amendment does not make it clear that there is a need for both aid and trade, but for that reason I am not minded—I regret—to support the amendment.

I think that it would be helpful for members if I were briefly to highlight some of the further changes to our international development work.