Category Archives: Aid

UK civil servants given just days to prepare £2.9bn aid cuts in 2020

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Cuts were agreed on the basis of a forecast shown five days later to be too pessimistic, report finds

UK civil servants were given five to seven working days to prepare 30% cuts in the overseas aid budget last summer, including a £730m cut to bilateral aid that it later emerged was unnecessary.

The cuts were agreed in July 2020 on the basis of a single forecast reduction in the size of the UK economy, which was shown to be too pessimistic five days after the cuts package was signed off.

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Irene Owens obituary

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My friend Irene Owens, who has died aged 102, was a typist, switch-board operator, air-raid warden, nursery nurse and one-woman aid provider to Zimbabwe after she befriended Sally Mugabe, the president’s wife.

Irene, known as Renie to her friends, first visited Zimbabwe in 1980 for a conference with the Moral Re-Armament movement (MRA), of which she was a member.

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‘On bad days, we don’t eat’: Hunger grows for thousands displaced by conflict in Chad

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As war forces more to flee, humanitarian organisations facing funding shortfalls and increasing demand are unable to keep pace

The number of people having to leave their homes in the Lake Chad region of central Africa has more than doubled over the past year with agencies warning they are struggling to feed people.

The fighting, which last month claimed the life of the president of Chad, Idriss Déby, has displaced more than 400,000 Chadians, according to the International Organization for Migration, a rise from 169,000 at the start of 2020. More than 65,000 people were displaced in the first quarter of this year.

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UK must reverse aid cuts ‘as soon as possible’ to help educate girls – Julia Gillard

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Former Australian PM wants Boris Johnson to make ‘ambitious pledge’ to support girls at Kenyan summit

The former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard has called for Britain to return its aid budget to pre-cuts levels “as soon as possible”.

Gillard, who now campaigns for education in lower-income countries as chair of the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), said she wanted the British government to step up with an “ambitious pledge” for global education when it co-hosts the G7 summit next month.

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Thousands of Cambodians go hungry in strict lockdown zones

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Rights groups say government and UN inaction has left people lacking food and medicine for weeks

Tens of thousands of Cambodians are going hungry under the country’s strict lockdown as Covid cases continue to rise amid criticism from human rights groups that the government and the UN are being too slow to act.

The south-east Asian country had recorded one of the world’s smallest coronavirus caseloads, but infections have climbed from about 500 in late February to 20,695 this week, with 136 deaths.

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Hidden scars: mentally ill patients lost in Yemen’s war

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With one psychiatrist for 750,000 people and huge stigma about mental health, patients get little help

Radhwan Ali Hassan lives with his mother in a small house perched at the top of a sleepy Yemeni village called Aqeeqah, on the outskirts of Taiz city. From inside his bare-walled room, the 35-year-old hears the distant sound of an ice-cream van. He sees children running past his window and can smell goats, but he cannot remember the last time he walked outside.

Thick metal shackles around his ankles are attached to a heavy chain fastened to the far wall. They clatter as Hassan paces his room, rocks from side to side and smiles vacantly. His pupils are wide, his movements slow.

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UK aid cuts will put tens of thousands of children at risk of famine, says charity

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Save the Children’s analysis finds Britain will spend 80% less on nutrition abroad this year, as hunger levels rise around the world

Britain is set to spend 80% less on helping feed children in poorer nations than before the pandemic, according to a charity’s analysis.

Save the Children said the British government will spend less than £26m this year on vital nutrition services in developing countries, a drop of more than three-quarters from 2019. The estimate of aid cuts to nutrition comes after UN agencies called for urgent action to avert famine in 20 countries including Yemen, South Sudan and northern Nigeria.

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UK cuts grants for small aid charities to save ‘less than cost of No 10 press room’

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Hospital in Zanzibar and support for child workers in Bangladesh among approved projects to miss out as £2.1m of funding cancelled

The UK has scrapped three rounds of grants to small international development charities, prompting fury that it has wiped out funding for 42 projects around the world to save “less than the [£2.6m] cost of the Downing Street press room”.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) told charities last week that rounds six, seven and eight of the Small Charities Challenge Fund (SCCF) would not go ahead because of aid cuts, cancelling in total about £2.1m of funds earmarked for new and future programmes, including many that had been approved.

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Britain’s aid cuts: what’s been announced so far

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Some programmes will have their funding cut by 85% or more as the UK reduces its spending

Britain announced last year that it would cut aid spending from 0.7% of national income to 0.5% – a reduction of more than £4bn. The cuts are not split evenly, with some programmes having funding reduced by 85% or more.

The Foreign Office said it would still spend more than £10bn this year to fight poverty, tackle the climate crisis and improve global health and would return to its 0.7% target when economic circumstances allowed – but it did not give a date or criteria for this. Among the cuts so far are:

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UK’s aid cuts hit vital coronavirus research around world

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Leading UK expert says loss of funding certain to damage attempts to tackle virus and variants

Vital coronavirus research, including a project tracking variants in India, has had its funding reduced by up to 70% under swingeing cuts to the UK overseas aid budget.

One of Britain’s leading infectious disease experts said the UK government cuts were certain to damage attempts to tackle the virus and track new variants.

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‘Devastating for women and girls’: UK cuts 85% in aid to UN family planning

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UNFPA says £130m being withheld would have helped prevent 250,000 child and maternal deaths in poorest countries

The British government is slashing its funding to the UN population fund (UNFPA) in a move described as “devastating” for women and girls.

The agency confirmed on Wednesday that the UK, its largest donor, is cutting funding for contraceptives and reproductive health supplies by 85% this year – from £154m to £23m – and cutting core funding from £20m to £8m.

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Almost 30 million will need aid in Sahel this year as crisis worsens, UN warns

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Armed conflicts, the climate crisis and Covid-19 are contributing to chronic risk of food insecurity in the region, says Unocha report

A record 29 million people will need humanitarian assistance in the Sahel and the Lake Chad basin in 2021 amid a deepening crisis, a report by the UN office for humanitarian affairs (Unocha) has estimated.

Almost one in four people in the border areas of Burkina Faso, northern Cameroon, Chad, Mali, Niger and north-east Nigeria are expected to need aid in 2021, 5 million more than a year ago, and a 52% rise on 2019.

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UK sends oxygen concentrators and ventilators to India – but no Covid vaccines

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Foreign Office says Britain ‘first out of the blocks’ with help but Labour calls it a drop in the ocean

The UK has been “the first out of the blocks” with help for India, but will not send vaccines to the Covid-ravaged country until Britain has surplus supplies, the Foreign Office minister Nigel Adams has told MPs.

He said the UK was responding to the Indian government’s needs, and had been the first country to provide practical support “in the face of heartbreaking scenes that had shocked us all”. He said he had friends of Indian heritage who were “at their wit’s end”, and vowed the UK would be at the forefront in providing aid.

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UK to slash funding for overseas water and sanitation projects by 80%

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Scale of aid cut emerges in leaked FCDO memo, prompting experts to describe it as ‘a national shame’

The UK is to slash funding for lifesaving water, sanitation and hygiene projects in developing nations by more than 80%, according to a leaked memo.

The cuts have been described as “savage”, “incredible” and “a national shame” by experts highlighting that sanitation and handwashing is a key line of defence during the coronavirus pandemic. The reduction to the bilateral aid budget was revealed as details emerged of cuts in the foreign aid budget.

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Dominic Raab is challenged to admit 40% cuts to foreign aid for girls’ education

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Former minister Lady Sugg also accuses Foreign Office of cutting key sexual health programmes

Lady Sugg, a former Foreign Office minister, has challenged her onetime boss Dominic Raab to admit he is cutting the UK aid budget for girls’ education by more than 40% as the foreign secretary also suggested UK bilateral aid to Africa would be reduced to a third of what it was two years ago.

She also claimed the government was planning to close its flagship Women’s Integrated Sexual Health programme and impose cuts of about 70-80% to spending on the Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition.

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‘Shortsighted’: UK cuts aid to project preparing cities for natural disaster

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From Quito to Kathmandu, millions will be endangered by cuts affecting planning for floods, earthquakes and fires, experts say


UK aid cuts to a programme working to reduce the disaster risk to poor communities around the world could endanger millions of lives and slam shut a brief window of opportunity to build safer cities for centuries to come, experts have warned.

Professor John McCloskey, from Edinburgh University, said the 70% cut to this year’s budget for the Tomorrow’s Cities project was an act of “vandalism” that had wrecked the past two years of collaboration with scientists, NGOs, authorities and communities in Ecuador’s capital Quito, Nairobi, Kathmandu and Istanbul.

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UK aid cut seen as unforced error in ‘year of British leadership’

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With UK hosting G7 and Cop26 this year, decision threatens Britain’s status as a ‘soft power’ superpower

Boris Johnson is said to be having “queasy second thoughts” about a long-term cut to the UK aid programme, faced both by the surprising unpopularity of the measure with his own backbenchers and the fact that most other G7 countries will come to the British-hosted summit in June increasing theirs – in the process endangering the UK status as a soft power superpower.

The official government line remains not to look at the falls in aid spending but the size of the budget as a proportion of gross national income, which is still in excess of most G7 countries. The reduced £10bn budget still puts the UK third in the aid spending league table and if anyone has doubts about the UK’s soft power status, the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, likes to cite an Ipsos Mori poll finding for the British Council in 2020 that found the UK was the most attractive country in the G20.

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‘No country immune’ from UK’s aid cuts, says Raab

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Foreign secretary denies that aid organisations are scared to speak out or people are going hungry

The UK foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, has told MPs that “no country is immune” from the impending aid cuts, but failed to clarify when specific plans would be made public.

Speaking after the release of the first details of the £4bn cuts to international aid, which have been widely criticised as “draconian” and opaque, the minister confirmed “no stand-alone” impact assessment had been carried out in individual countries but that “we identify risks we see across the board”.

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No impact assessment made of Yemen aid cuts, official admits

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Minister tells MPs that cuts come at ‘terrible’ time, with 16m close to famine as Covid infections double

The UK government has admitted that no assessment has been carried out of how “dire” the impact of the 60% cut in foreign aid to Yemen will be.

Related: UK 'balancing books on backs of Yemen's starving people', says UN diplomat

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Humanitarian system is failing people in crisis, says UN aid chief

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Exclusive: coordinator of UN’s relief operation to say agencies not listening to needs of those in need

The world’s multibillion-dollar humanitarian system is struggling because unaccountable aid agencies are not listening to what people say they need and instead are deciding for them, the UN’s humanitarian agency head will say this week.

In a startling analysis of the programme he oversees, Mark Lowcock, the coordinator of the UN’s aid relief operation since 2017, will say he has reached the view that “one of the biggest failings” of the system is that agencies “do not pay enough attention” to the voices of people caught up in crises.

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