SIXTH REPORT
The International Development Committee
has agreed to the following Report:
DEPARTMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT:
DEPARTMENTAL REPORT 2002
SUMMARY
The Department for International Development's (DFID's)
activities cover all stages of the cycle of development policy
and practice from people's experiences of poverty, to measurement
and models of poverty and its reduction, to policies, actions,
and back to the experience of—hopefully reduced—poverty.
In pursuit of its goal of eliminating world poverty, DFID works
in partnership with a range of organisations, at and across global,
national, and local levels. DFID is a small but important cog
in an extremely complex system of international development. This—along
with the impossibility of identifying DFID's specific contribution
to poverty reduction, as opposed to that of the international
development community as a whole—makes it difficult for
DFID to be accountable for its actions. The Departmental Report
is an opportunity for DFID to demonstrate how it integrates the
cycle of development policy and practice, and to account for its
spending in pursuit of its aims and objectives.
This report examines DFID's Departmental Report for
2002, commenting on the picture it paints of DFID's activities,
and suggesting ways in which it—and the activities which
it reports on—might be improved in subsequent years. Taking
its lead from DFID's Departmental Report, this report focuses
on DFID's translation of policy into action through the injection
and allocation of resources. Key themes include the following:
- The importance of the Millennium Development
Goals (MDGs) and the Public Service Agreement (PSA) in driving
and organising DFID's work;
- DFID's resource allocation processes and the
potential tension which results from having primarily sectoral
targets and primarily geographical resource allocations;
- The new Public Service Agreement and Country
Assistance Plans, which promise to make DFID a more effective
development agency;
- DFID's portfolio of countries, the ways in which
DFID decides which countries to be involved in—including
its assessment of its comparative advantage—and the nature
of DFID involvement;
- The monitoring and evaluation of progress towards
the MDGs, and of DFID's development interventions at the grassroots.
We believe that DFID needs to make its strategy—the
ways in which it integrates the cycle of development policy and
practice—more explicit. We welcome therefore, innovative
mechanisms such as those piloted in Russia to select partner countries
on the basis of a clear strategy and explicitly-stated criteria.
By being both strategic and explicit, DFID will become a more
accountable and more effective development agency. To this end,
future Departmental Reports must provide clear answers to the
following questions:
- What are DFID's objectives and how is the achievement
of these objectives expected to contribute to the achievement
of the MDGs?
- What resources does DFID have to achieve its
objectives, and how have these resources been allocated, both
by objective and by country?
- What is DFID's model of poverty and of the obstacles
to achieving its poverty reduction objective, and how does this
model inform DFID's policy, activities and spending?
- What activities has DFID been engaged in in pursuit
of its objectives, and where, and what have been the results of
these activities?
- How does DFID monitor and evaluate its activities
and their contribution to achieving the MDGs, and test and develop
its model of poverty and its overall strategy for the elimination
of poverty?
Background and acknowledgements
We announced an inquiry into the Department for International
Development's Departmental Report on 8 May 2002. During the course
of the inquiry, DFID provided written and oral evidence to supplement
the information already contained in the 2002 Departmental Report
and other DFID publications. In total we received six written
memoranda, and held one evidence session with DFID officials at
Westminster.
We are grateful to all the people and organisations
who gave evidence to the inquiry, and to those who assisted us
in other ways. We would like to thank especially the following
people from DFID who gave oral evidence: Suma Chakrabarti, Permanent
Secretary; Richard Manning, Director-General for Policy; and Mark
Lowcock, Director for Finance and Development Policy.
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