Summary
Covid-19 constitutes a substantial challenge and dilemma for the international development community. The pandemic must be tackled but the right tools have not been available and the interim measures, from social distancing to isolation and lockdowns, create their own, very serious, problems. We welcome news that an effective vaccine seems to be emerging from trials but in the meantime much damage is taking place. The former DFID Secretary of State told us that the work of 30 years of development was being undone; and the progress made against the UN Sustainable Development Goals was being rolled back.
Uniquely, for a humanitarian disaster in the last 100 years or so, almost every country in the world has been affected. The countries hit hardest have also been from every income band and continent. Everyone is struggling, trying to balance the risks of restrictions with those of the disease, while waiting for new and effective vaccines, treatments and tests.
The evidence submitted to the inquiry shows, the restrictions imposed by governments, as well as those adopted voluntarily by different agencies have inevitably hampered effective activity in the humanitarian and development sector just as much as in any other area of activity.
At an early stage in this crisis, evidence was submitted to the inquiry on the potential for the pandemic to have serious secondary impacts, including on non-coronavirus health priorities, economies and livelihoods, food security and nutrition, education and training, treatment of women and children, respect for human rights and humanitarian law, community cohesion and tolerance of displaced persons and other minorities. This evidence seems to have proven more accurate, more rapidly, than warnings we also received about Covid-19’s primary impacts in terms of morbidity and mortality across the Global South and particularly in Africa. We have launched a second inquiry to consider further certain of these secondary impacts and UK aid-funded interventions and initiatives aimed at their mitigation.
Overall, however, we found there were serious challenges in assembling an accurate picture of the situation in many countries. This was due to a range of factors: the challenge of gathering consistent and reliable data; the incredibly speedy ebb and flow of infections; and the sheer scale of the pandemic; and variations in its effects and impacts which cut across conventional geographic and economic categories for analysis. In addition, with interpretations of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic still being debated, it is hardly surprising that the absence of perspective also bedevils a robust and reliable global understanding picture of today’s still-raging outbreak.
We welcome the UK’s specific contributions to the global response, initially a total of £744 million and, latterly, a further £500 million for vaccines, including their equitable distribution across developing countries. It is fair to set that against the Government’s total commitment of public expenditure in response to the pandemic—at home and abroad—which is assessed by the National Audit Office to be around £210 billion. In addition, we note the evidence from the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that points out that funding for global public goods—those activities addressing global challenges such as cancer research—does not count as official development assistance (ODA) because it benefits people in developed countries as much as those in developing countries. This suggests that funds committed by the Government to research and development for coronavirus vaccines, therapies and tests will not necessarily all qualify as ODA.
The coronavirus pandemic has posed a challenge to established structures and assumptions about, not only the international development community but the international community as a whole. If the world cannot step up to this test, which so explicitly and literally demands a collaborative, leave no-one behind, solution, then progress on anything less urgent, and less immediately self-interested, seems very far from certain.
In June 2020, in the midst of this crisis, the Prime Minister announced that DFID and the FCO were to be merged, effective from 1st September. The timing of this reform was not stated to be despite the crisis, but rather demanded by it in the form of a more integrated response. We have yet to be provided with compelling examples or argument in support of this thesis. Covid-19 is certainly challenging many aspects of international development policy-making and crisis management. In particular the pandemic has further unveiled many antagonistic and competitive fault-lines running through the international community.
We would echo the Prime Minister’s criticism of the international community’s lack of cooperative spirit in his speech to the UN General Assembly in September 2020. However, we believe that a clearer statement of the objectives of the merger, providing context for the references to pursuit of the national interest and available opportunities, would have provided a firmer foundation for the Prime Minister’s rhetoric. We await such foundations in the outcomes of the Integrated Review, in the UK’s continued leadership on development priorities, and the deployment of UK diplomacy to keep Covid-19 from swamping international attention to progress against the Global Goals and other development aspirations.
On the specific next steps, we believe the FCDO should, on behalf of the UK:
- re-commit to its ongoing programmes and provide new funding for the Covid-19 response rather than allowing the transfer of scarce resources from existing programmes, especially those tackling other diseases
- recognise that the eradication of the pandemic everywhere is an integral part of resolving the threat anywhere and therefore switch its financial support for Covid-19 vaccines, therapies and tests voluntarily from its ODA pot to other budgets (thereby freeing up resources for more frontline activity on secondary impacts in developing countries)
- use its significant leverage as top actor in many areas (gender equality, disability inclusion, poverty alleviation) to lead an inclusive and transparent approach by the donor community (both bilateral and multilateral), and
- put local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and their partner International NGOs at the heart of the global Covid-19 response as they are closest to end-user communities and benefit from existing relationships of trust and confidence.
At a strategic level, we urge the Prime Minister and the Government to be more ambitious for the UK’s G7 Presidency than simply calling for better cooperation in spotting, preventing and fighting another pandemic more effectively. Rather, we recommend the Government lead a charge towards the establishment of a holistic global health and nutrition strategy—based around achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Three more broadly—that will put the world in a position to respond effectively to the next global health challenge, and the one after that, whatever these turn out to be; rather than just the last one we struggled with.
Having said that, we welcome these strong signals of the UK’s intent to engage fully with the international community in these matters as well as the concrete evidence provided by the announcement of substantial new funding. In particular, we applaud the increased UK funding for the beleaguered World Health Organisation (W.H.O.), as well as at least £500 million for the W.H.O.-led Covax initiative to guarantee that people in all corners of the world will have access to Covid-19 vaccines, once they are available, regardless of their economic power.
Published: 13 November 2020 Site information Accessibility statement