Health Poverty Action welcomes the UK coalition Government’s commitment to international development. We will be watching closely to see how these commitments are translated into reality in the coming months, and holding the Government to account over its promises to the world’s poor.
The Government’s commitments that are most closely related to our mission of improving the health of the poorest include:
• Aid spending will reach 0.7% of national income by 2013.
• Action to help achieve the Millennium Development Goals, including working to ensure everyone has access to healthcare, clean water, and sanitation; to reduce maternal and infant mortality; and to restrict the spread of major diseases like HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria.
• Recognition of the vital role of women in development and promoting gender equality and the rights of women, children and disabled people to access services.
• A specific push this year to make greater progress in tackling maternal and infant mortality.
• Efforts to tackle economic justice issues like speeding up debt relief and reforming the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
• An emphasis on the role of civil society and the need for transparency in aid.
• Keeping aid separate from commercial interests, with DFID as a distinct department focused on poverty reduction, and sticking to international rules on what counts as aid.
These promises are important and delivering on them could make a real difference to the lives of millions of poor people worldwide. In addition, three areas of the coalition’s proposals will need to be carefully scrutinised to see how they work out in practice:
The Government is proposing to involve the British public more in how aid is spent. While accountability here in the UK is important, aid must be targeted to those who need it most: the poorest and most vulnerable. Also, accountability is greatly lacking between citizens of developing countries and their governments. Efforts to help those governments increase domestic resources, for example strengthening links between states and their citizens by increasing effective taxation of wealthier individuals and companies, would help to build this kind of ’downward’ accountability.
The Government highlights the central role of trade in today’s globalised world. Exchange of goods and services between people and nations can create jobs and wealth. But the current trade system is unfair and can have a severe impact on people’s health. It can block poor people’s access to life-saving medicines, put them at risk of hunger and malnutrition and prevent them from earning a living. It also affects the kind of tax and other economic policies set by developing country governments. We will be looking to the coalition to develop genuinely pro-poor trade deals, for example giving the poorest countries additional rights and special treatment to protect them from these outcomes.
The Government’s proposal for a more integrated approach to post-conflict reconstruction is welcome, and we hope this will extend beyond regions where the UK military is involved. One billion people now live in fragile states and health is a crucial element to this. In nearly all conflicts, more people are killed through disease and malnutrition than from fighting itself. The Government should prioritise fragile states and help to rebuild health and other essential services so that people are not denied their right to life and health.
Read our comments on the Government’s policies in the Guardian.
Last modified: 15/12/2010
