Posted on July 21, 2011 by Phillip Lee

At the last General Election, the Conservative Party promised to spend 0.7% of GDP on International Development. At a time of austerity at home, with a national debt bequeathed to us by the last government to deal with and the inevitable, uncomfortable reductions in government spending, it has certainly been a ‘hard sell’ for me to advocate a policy which involves spending more money abroad! Judging by my mail bag, it is a subject that angers a lot of my constituents. It is known by many of them that I have sympathy with those who believe that the international development budget should have been ‘thrown in the pot’ with all other government budgets. I also agree with those people who have criticised the destinations of some our development money, such as India (where a space programme continues to grow!), however, I still hold to the belief that we have a moral duty to provide for those in less fortunate circumstances, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Furthermore, by supporting these people at an early stage I believe that we might just see an improvement in the long-term governance of countries which have had recent records of chaos and abject failure. If that were achieved, it would only be of great benefit to this country’s future.

That is not to say that I think that campaigns to support international aid and development always get it totally right. This week, I visited two schools in Bracknell, Harmans Water Primary and Garth Hill College, to support their efforts in the national campaign ‘Send My Sister to School’. What impressed me on both visits was both the children’s strong interest in the lives of others in less fortunate circumstances than themselves and their obvious desire to contribute in any way to improve their opportunities. In 2000, world leaders made a commitment to providing universal quality primary education for all children by 2015. There are, however, still 67 million children missing out on school and more than half of them are girls. The ‘Send My Sister to School’ campaign is all about drawing attention to how many children in the world go without education and lobby me as the Member of Parliament to support it at Westminster. Although the campaign has obvious merit and has a goal worthy of my support, I was not convinced that its literature was providing enough relevant information to the children. For example, to have not mentioned the obvious challenge of global population growth over recent decades was surprising. The population of this planet topped 7 billion recently, arriving at the total earlier than was expected. That figure is almost double that found in 1970, the year of my birth. So, in my short (!) life an extra 3.3 billion people have been added to the world population, all of whom want water, homes, heat, food, healthcare, education, jobs, electricity, etc……. Meeting all of those challenges will be a very tall order indeed.