UK aid policy combines self-interest with commitment to development

British Prime Minister David Cameron will award Ebola medals on Tuesday to UK citizens who served in West Africa over the last nine months. Two GOAL staff will be among the initial recipients with a further 15 to follow. It will my pleasure to accompany them to a reception in 10 Downing Street.

Of all days for GOAL and so many other organisations to receive this recognition, today seems appropriate in some way.

Today is the tenth anniversary of the 7/7 bombings when four suicide bombers detonated bombs on three London underground trains and a London bus, killing 52 people.

The UK could have been forgiven for becoming insular or defensive in response to these catastrophic attacks. Instead, the UK has embraced a new internationalism that places the country at the forefront of efforts to tackle major global issues, including potential global pandemics like Ebola.

In March 2015, the UK parliament passed the International Development Act which enshrined in law the country's commitment to spending 0.7 per cent of its gross national income on overseas aid. In 2013 the UK was the first G8 country to reach this target.

As John Ging, Director of Operations at UN OCHA (and formerly of GOAL), pointed out last week at the Irish Humanitarian Summit, if all OECD countries matched this commitment, there would be no shortfall in the funding of humanitarian emergencies. The UK is now the number-two aid donor in the world.

So why is the UK so far out in front on these issues.

The act was passed just weeks before one of the tightest election campaigns in recent history. It was pushed through in spite of great demands on other parts of the Treasury budget. It enjoyed cross-party support despite the stirrings of public disquiet about the efficiency of the aid budget.

The issue is neither a vote-winner or a vote-loser. So electoralism can be ruled out.

Some of the motivation includes an enlightened self-interest, including opening new markets and decreasing aid dependency, but it is still a huge achievement.

President Higgins argued last week that we should look at poverty reduction from a perspective of the universality of human rights as opposed to the perspective of national interest. The British experience suggests that this is a false dichotomy and that the two are legitimate parallel motivations for overseas aid.

As Justine Greening, the overseas aid minister said earlier this year “Tackling poverty overseas is about addressing the root causes of global challenges such as disease, migration, terrorism and climate change, all of which are the right things to do and firmly in Britain’s own national interest.”

This is a telling sentence, conflating Britain’s interests with the great issues of the day. Tackling Ebola is the right thing to do as well as being firmly in Britain’s national interest.

The response of the NHS and other UK actors to the Ebola outbreak was swift and decisive despite the great uncertainties in August and September 2014. Although there are still cases in Sierra Leone, the threat of this becoming a global pandemic has receded. It is easy to forget just how perilous the position was in September 2014.

It will be recalled that forecasts from the US Centre for Disease Control suggested as many as 1.2 million cases on a business-as-usual basis. The threat to the global economy and global health was profound.

The President of the World Bank, Dr Jim Yong Kim, at an Iveagh House lecture two weeks ago, referred to a Towers Watson survey of insurance industry leaders in 2013 in which leaders identified global pandemics as the number one threat to their industry.

Naturally there are lessons for other countries including Ireland. Our own spend on overseas aid has dropped back to 0.4 per cent which is not surprising. The recovery will allow improvements on this figure. We also need to think of ways to release the expertise of the HSE in circumstances of future global epidemics, taking a more “whole-of-government” approach to development issues. Declaring neutrality in the war against Ebola was not a smart move.

While today’s medal ceremony is a welcome reminder of the dedication of the many people who volunteered to tackle Ebola, they would be the first to acknowledge that the great burden of responsibility was borne on the shoulders of the local people in the affected countries.

Britain has come a long way in the last 10 years. I hope it is not a stretch to suggest that British internationalism today goes some way to demonstrating the proposition that the terrorists failed in their mission.

Barry Andrews is CEO of GOAL.