Hansard

I welcome the Scottish Government’s international development strategy and its £10 million funding commitment, alongside complementary funding streams such as the climate justice fund and the humanitarian aid fund. I note that all of those have been welcomed by a range of stakeholders in advance of today’s debate, including SCIAF and Oxfam.

I begin my comments by taking the opportunity to promote the general principle of international aid, because lately it has been under attack from elements of the right-wing press and what are known as alt-right politicians, and it is important that we counter those attacks. Our cross-party record of support in Scotland puts us in a good position to do that.

It is now almost 12 years since 225,000 people, all dressed in white, marched through Edinburgh in support of the make poverty history campaign in 2005. I am proud to say that I was one of them. It was the 20th anniversary of the Live Aid concerts, which had first focused the world’s attention on Africa. The point of make poverty history was that the spirit of Live Aid needed to be permanent. The problem of global poverty and inequality required not just charity, but global structural and political changes and hard cash.

The year 2005 was also the year in which the Scottish international development strategy that we have had until today had its roots. The G8 summit took place in our country and its focus was on alleviating absolute poverty from the developing world, in particular sub-Saharan Africa. I pay tribute to the Government of Jack McConnell, who felt that it was important that Scotland did its bit to make a difference. It was not without opposition, probably from the same right-wing papers that attack aid today. In that year, the then Scottish Government signed the agreement with Malawi that has been so successful. The incoming SNP Government unveiled an international development strategy in 2008, which is being replaced today after extensive consultation and assessment.

My involvement in 2005 was also professional, as I was the editor of the magazine for delegates to the G8 summit that year, and I sent Scottish journalists from The Herald newspaper to Eritrea and Tanzania to put a human face to the issues that were to be discussed by world leaders. The millennium development goals that they were committed to included access to clean water, reducing child mortality and access to education. One of our reporters who went to Eritrea, in East Africa, rose before dawn with a little girl to make the long 5 kilometre trek, with a pitcher, to collect muddy water for her family—that was before the girl even managed to get to school; sometimes she was too tired to go to school. That was the human face of make poverty history.

Diarrhoea caused by dirty water and bad sanitation is still the second-biggest child killer worldwide. There are 2.4 billion people in the world who still lack access to improved sanitation. Partly as a result of the G8 summit in Scotland and the commitments that were made, there have been advances. According to the UN, the world has met the target of halving the proportion of people who do not have access to improved sources of water, which is five years ahead of schedule. Between 1990 and 2015, 2.6 billion people gained access to improved drinking water sources.

That is just one issue. There have also been improvements in maternal health and access to education and a reduction in the number of people living on what was, in 2005, less than a dollar a day. Those improvements are a direct result of international aid, because international aid works.

At the G8 summit, world leaders committed to spending $48 billion a year by 2010, and $1 billion a year was used to wipe out debt for the most highly indebted poor countries. All UK political parties committed to maintaining the aid target of 0.7 per cent of national income. Although I had many disagreements with David Cameron’s Government, it was commendable that he stuck to that commitment. I hope that the present UK Government’s Department for International Development, under Priti Patel, maintains the commitment that existed under Mr Cameron.

I am very pleased to note that there is absolutely no chance of us in Scotland reneging on any of the commitments that we have made. We contribute to the UK’s international development spending through our taxes, and our own fund is additional to that. There is a consensus in Scotland that it is the right thing to do and that it makes us better global citizens—to borrow from the title of the new strategy.

There appears to be a consensus in the submissions from charities that the priorities of the strategy should be to address those in the greatest poverty, and by focusing on just four countries—three of them in sub-Saharan Africa—we can do that more effectively.

The Scottish Government’s approach to date has also been tightly focused. It has been to work with NGOs and experts in Scotland and in the countries themselves. It is fair to say that the system is more accountable than when large sums of aid are channelled through governments.

The Scottish system of delivering small grants and project funding allows us to see exactly where the money is spent. I had a glance at the Scottish Government’s grants for 2016 and was impressed by how well they illustrated the aims of the new strategy. For example, the grants included £20,000 to enable Haemophilia Scotland to educate 300 health workers in Malawi about bleeding disorders, which is an excellent example of partnership. Another £48,000 was used to help communities suffering from leprosy in Zambia and Tanzania to generate their own income through work. Many other Scottish projects have helped to improve maternal health over the years through work by clinicians from Scotland who have travelled to Malawi.

However, I agree with SCIAF, in its briefing, that we should always, where possible, use expertise and workers from the country itself to build up capacity. A good example of that is the work that the Scotland Malawi business group has been doing with Stirling university—backed by the Scottish Government—to promote aquaculture in Malawi, so that people can earn a living, nutrition can be improved and food security can be increased in local communities through small-scale fish farming. That is a good example of the beyond aid approach.

“Give a poor man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to fish and you give him an occupation that will feed him for a lifetime.”

That is a very old Chinese proverb, but it is apt for our 21st century international development strategy.