The International Development Committee is today publishing the
FCDO Equality Impact Assessment provided to Ministers earlier
this year to inform their decisions on where significant cuts to
the Official Development Assistance budget for 2023-24 would
fall.
, Chair of the
International Development Committee, said:
“Evidence submitted to the Committee over the last few years told
us the cuts to UK ODA would take a human toll. But this
astonishingly honest assessment of the real impact makes grim
reading. It is a litany of the people - living in poverty,
suffering hunger, women, girls, disabled people – who will no
longer be supported by the UK’s direct aid spending, and the
consequences they will face.
“By the FCDO’s own assessment, critical support to tackle
malnutrition will not be delivered. Programmes aimed at reaching
those furthest behind – including women, girls and people with
disabilities – will be cut. Hundreds of thousands more women once
again face unsafe abortions, thousands will die in pregnancy and
childbirth.
“There will be a further political hit to the UK’s leadership on
global and regional programmes. These must have been
intolerable decisions for officials to make, and it is hard to
see how the terrible impact set out here sits with FCDO’s
recently restated commitment to ‘persuade more of our fellow
citizens that international development is core to our own
national interest as well as the right thing to do’.
“It is crucial that promised uplifts in the planned allocations
for 2024/25 go to the people with protected characteristics who,
by FCDO’s own assessment, have borne the brunt of these
cuts.”
The FCDO’s bilateral country allocations for the 2023/24
financial year were subject to ‘ODA savings’ as a result of the
decision to reduce the UK’s ODA spending from 0.7% to 0.5% of
Gross National Income. The Equality Impact Assessment sets out
what this means in reality for some of the poorest countries in
the world, experiencing the worst humanitarian crises:
Yemen saw its UK ODA allocation cut by 45%; Afghanistan by
an incredible 76%. The FCDO sought to mitigate these cuts but was
only able to offer limited additional support. For Afghanistan,
this still resulted in a 59% cut.
Equality Impact Assessments are not required to be produced and
are not usually made public. Last year the Government refused to
produce this information voluntarily. Instead the Committee
obtained and published an Equality Impact Assessment that
highlighted the likely impact of significant cuts to
disability-inclusive aid programmes. The Assessment
published today was conducted by the FCDO to assess the overall
potential impact of ongoing reductions to the ODA budget on
people with protected characteristics and was provided to the
Committee to publish.
