What does the UK Aid Strategy mean for programme delivery…
The new UK Aid Strategy, announced as part of the Spending Review in November, has attracted a range of comments from pundits across the blogosphere. Posts by Owen Barder, Jonathan Glennie, Simon Maxwell, ODI commentators, and others provide a useful critique of the opportunities and challenges we face in ensuring that UK development policy remains relevant for today’s global context.
In case you missed it, the UK Aid Strategy sets out how the global development architecture is changing as the world faces new challenges such as increasing global insecurity, the threat of terrorism and global climate change. It explains how our resources will increasingly focus on tackling the root causes of these great global challenges with four objectives:
- Strengthening global peace, security and governance
- Strengthening resilience and response to crises
- Promoting global prosperity and economic development
- Tackling extreme poverty and helping the world’s most vulnerable
As Justine Greening set out in a speech at Chatham House in October last year, the strategy sets out how international development is firmly rooted in the UK’s national interests:
UK’s international development policy is not only the right thing to do but also the smart thing to do for Britain’s national interest.
A theme that runs through the strategy is how the changes to UK’s approach to aid and development will involve a re-orientation of DFID’s programme with a greater focus on transformation and ensuring that UK international development commitments tackle these new global challenges. I think that this also reaffirms that we are not simply interested in easily measurable results, but results that are delivered in a way that tackle the root causes of poverty, ensuring sustainable change in the way systems work to reduce poverty.
Does this have any impact on how we design and deliver development programmes?
I think that the changing global architecture and the new UK Aid Strategy make the changes we’ve been making to how we work more relevant than they have ever been.
Delivering programmes that can tackle the root causes of poverty, conflict and insecurity will require programmes that can adapt to — and influence — different local contexts. Being able to take well-managed risks for politically smart and flexible programming will be a core capability. And we, with our partners, will need a more in-depth understanding of local contexts, greater confidence to use judgement and stronger partnerships based on trust and mutual accountability. Finally, we will need to work closely across the UK government to have a more coherent approach, maximising our collective impact.
This is what DFID’s programme delivery reforms have been all about and will need to continue to drive as we implement the strategy.