Michael Nazir-Ali

Why can’t Britain’s foreign aid be used to help Christians too?

Too much is lost to suffocating bureaucracy, inefficiency and outright corruption

[Getty Images]

For years now, the British government has prided itself on how much money it gives away in foreign aid. But of course it’s not just the amount that matters — it’s how effective it is. Now that the Prime Minister is to wrap the Department for International Development back into the Foreign Office, it’s a chance for us to ask again: who are we as a country? What are our values? And how can we ensure that taxpayers’ money is well spent?

It can be difficult to ensure that a recipient of aid is legitimate and worthy. That’s why there’s been a tendency for the UK and aid agencies to rely on giving to foreign governments and their bureaucracies.

But in doing this we’ve risked sending good money after bad: losing it amid suffocating bureaucracy, inefficiency and outright corruption. In Pakistan, for example, a large chunk of educational aid is in danger of being wasted because DfID-related contractors have built substandard school buildings which may need replacing. I have also asked repeatedly, without satisfactory response, whether any of Britain’s educational aid to Pakistan might be being used to continue producing textbooks which promote religious hatred. There seems little independent monitoring of textbook revision, and even those responsible for it have told me that as soon as they remove the teaching of hate from one set of books, it breaks out somewhere else.

About a third of the UK development budget is given to other aid agencies, such as the UN. Once again, we need to ask: how is this money spent? It has been well documented, for example, that Christian refugees from Iraq and Syria are generally absent from UN-run camps in Jordan, the Lebanon and Turkey because these can be controlled by Islamists who insist on compliance with Sharia to gain admission.

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