The most damning report on this Conservative government’s aid strategy comes not from any development charity but from the Tory minister responsible for international development. Andrew Mitchell has this week released a Foreign Office analysis that describes the “severe” consequences of the government’s reduced aid spending. In Yemen, half a million women and children will not receive healthcare and “fewer preventable deaths will be avoided”. In Somalia, a programme to counter female genital mutilation may be deferred or dropped altogether. Across Africa, there will be far more unsafe abortions and women dying in childbirth.
This widespread devastation is civil servants’ assessment of the impact from just one year of cuts to aid spending, yet the UK is into its fourth straight year of reduced development, during a period that has encompassed a global pandemic, a dire shortage of Covid vaccines, a worldwide inflation shock and a violent invasion of Ukraine that has disrupted international supplies of grain and oil.
