Keith and Ida Waddell, Church of Scotland Mission Partners in Zambia, outline the reality of the controversial decision to cut the UK’s International Aid Budget.

WE, as Mission Partners in Zambia, are greatly concerned with the present and apparent growing indifference and lack of positive engagement of the Westminster authorities towards the wider world in general, and Zambia in particular.

Therefore, it was encouraging to read the reactions of the mainstream Churches to the vote in the British Parliament on cutting the International Aid Budget from the promised O.7% to 0.5% of Gross National Income (GNI).

The decision has rightly been described as a moral failure, unfair, unwise and immoral, heartless and self-defeating.

It is important to hear the prophetic voice of the Church, when unjust things are being done and it speaks out for the effect these policies are having on the world’s poor.

In cash terms, we understand, it is a cut of around £4.5bn, the £14.5bn spent in 2020 falling to around £10bn.

The UK’s development approach shamefully, yet unashamedly, focuses on what directly benefits the national interest at the time of the UK Govemment, and is geared much less towards poverty reduction and the welfare of the poorest people and countries. International aid, if it is to be worthy of the name, should be given, with some degree of altruism, to help meet the most pressing development needs of the countries it is supporting, focusing on the poorest and most vulnerable countries and their citizens.

Aid should not be just leveraged according to the UK’s economic, security and development interests.

In human terms, on a global scale, the reduction means 103,571 fewer lives protected, as childhood immunisation campaigns for preventable infectious diseases go unfunded. 15.7 million fewer women and children will benefit from essential nutrition programmes and 4.5 million fewer children will be helped from educational schemes. Two million fewer people will receive humanitarian relief, 7.2 million women will lose access to family planning and reproductive health arrangements, and 15.8 million people will no longer receive the same level of care with tropical diseases.

In crude terms the International Aid figures point to 28% cut all round, so we can expect the total budgeted for Zambia to fall from £42m to around £30m. This will have a seriously damaging effect on the Zambian Government’s attempt to reach a number of Sustainable Development Goals in the areas of acute malnutrition and food security, on the health and well-being and the provision of clean water and sanitation for many of its underserved people.

The UK Government has lost a great opportunity here, to showcase its much vaunted Global Britain with a generous, proactive and restorative International Aid component to a new ethical foreign policy. Instead, an irresponsible decision was taken that will have a minimal impact on the problem it is supposed to address ‘back home’.

The inequity of vaccine distribution is another example of this type of selfishness. After an initial £250m donation to Covax, nothing further has been heard from or given by the UK Government. Last week our second batch of 288 000 of Covax AZ donated by the people of France, arrived in Zambia, an enthusiastic member of the Commonwealth. Apparently, there is no excess or spare from the 500 million doses the UK has already bought up.

The UK is currently looking to vaccinate their under 12 population, Zambia has yet to fully vaccinate those on the frontlines in hospitals and health centres who are caring for the sick and actively fighting the pandemic at source. Zambia has lost 146 doctors and nurses to the pandemic; the 78 doctors lost is close to 10% of the total doctors’ roll across the country.

The international community need to accelerate their efforts to increase vaccine access in Zambia and the wider African continent to prevent an even more catastrophic tragedy from unfolding. Less than 4% of people in Africa are vaccinated. A fourth wave is now being predicted.

Meanwhile many churches and faithbased organisations have lent their support to the coalition called the People’s Vaccine. Its primary aim is to make the vaccine available to all, everywhere and free of charge, initially to frontline workers and the vulnerable.

In conclusion we would urge that the Church regularly remind the British Government of its broken commitment to spending 0.7% of GNI in International Aid. We believe that working together as a part of an advocacy coalition, such collaborative work as is the case with the People’s Vaccine, enhances the reputation of the Church as a powerful force for justice, compassion and the common good, thereby upholding practically biblical tenets that support social justice. ¤