The more we find out about the way the Department for International Development (Dfid) has gone about dispensing Britain’s overseas aid budget, the more dismaying the emerging reality becomes. Following recent revelations that the department regularly pays inflated fees to favoured consultants with no apparent attendant benefit towards alleviating global poverty, we now learn that millions of pounds earmarked to improve education for girls has actually been spent on better schooling for boys.
The official aid watchdog has found that the Girls’ Education Challenge, launched four years ago with a budget of £355 million of taxpayers’ money, failed to meet its targets for many of the projects it sponsored. In Kenya, Tanzania, South Sudan and the tribal areas of Pakistan, funds released specifically to give poor and vulnerable girls in remote regions access to education ended up being diverted into improving existing facilities available only to the brothers of those girls. When female education did receive additional resources the money tended to be spent in wealthier, more urban areas rather than in isolated rural regions.
The argument might be made that any money invested in third world education, be it for boys, girls, the relatively better off or the desperately poor, is money well spent. Not so. Even Dfid, which enjoys generous funding thanks to David Cameron’s commitment to preserving the aid budget at 0.7 per cent of GDP at all costs, does not have limitless resources, despite behaving as if it does. Indeed, avoiding such a scattergun approach was precisely what underlay the decision to focus on raising the educational opportunities for poor girls in backward regions.
In utilitarian cost-benefit terms, this policy was sound. All the evidence points to the supreme importance of girls’ education in reducing child marriage, infant mortality and HIV. Unfortunately Dfid seems to have lost the nerve, the nous or the know-how to see its own policy through to fruition.
When local factors such as poor infrastructure, cultural and religious hostility to girls’ education, difficult terrain and conflict presented obstacles to spending and monitoring the money for the purposes intended, Dfid all too often seems to have caved in to these pressures. Targets were changed, priorities reassessed, resources that should have gone to girls were reallocated to boys.
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No one is suggesting that delivering such change in places such as northern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan is easy. The attempted murder by the Taliban in 2012 of 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai, the heroic advocate for girls to be allowed to attend school in her native Swat Valley, stands as a horrifying illustration of the depravity of the medieval tyrants opposing progress.
Combating such barbarism, however, was and is the entire point of funding a programme aimed at educating the girls suffering brutal repression. Generous fees were no doubt paid out by Dfid to its advisers to help the department decide that such a programme was a good idea. And so it is. When it came to the hard grind of actually implementing this programme, the evidence in the report today suggests that Dfid bottled it.
If Priti Patel, the development secretary, was not yet convinced of the shortcomings of the ministry she leads, the scale of the reforms she must make should now be clear to her.