Robert Curgenven is asking the States to freeze the cash budget of the States’ Overseas Aid & Development Commission until 2037.
That would reverse the current policy of increasing the budget by inflation plus £400,000 a year, which was agreed after previous States Assemblies acknowledged that the island’s contribution to overseas aid was low compared to most other places.
‘The commission’s cash limit has been increased from £3,855,000 for 2023 to £5,608,000 for 2026, and the Policy & Resources Committee intends to continue a real-terms increase of £400,000 in each year to 2030, which would bring it to about £8.1m.
‘Measured against the path described in the 2026 Budget... the saving over the 10 budget years 2027 to 2036 is approximately £32m.,’ said Deputy Curgenven.
His amendment, submitted ahead of the next week’s landmark tax and spending debate, has been seconded by Alderney Representative Edward Hill.
They want to encourage the commission to obtain more funding from the corporate and charitable sectors.
They have also indicated that they believe the commission does not currently get the maximum possible return for grants, and they are asking the States to instruct that in future ‘decisions on overseas aid should be made with regard to the effectiveness of the proposed interventions’.
They pointed to research on health-related development projects, which showed that the best aid initiatives could be 100 times more effective than some others.
‘0.1% of GDP applied to the most effective interventions produces about as much benefit as 5% of GDP applied to the median intervention, or 1,000% of GDP applied to the least effective,’ said Deputy Curgenven.
‘Where one intervention is 10 or 100 times as effective as another, moving funds from the second to the first produces almost as much benefit as adding an equal sum.’
The final part of the amendment would scrap a States direction from 2019 which adopted a target of increasing overseas aid contributions to the equivalent of 0.2% of the island’s GDP by 2030.
You need to be logged in to comment.