Western aid does more harm than good? Tell that to the 500,000 people who were saved from dying from TB in 2007-08
One little boy's face continues to haunt me. I met him on a visit with Save the Children earlier this year to the Sanjay slum in Rajasthan in India. His mother had named him Lucky – a name with something of a hollow ring. He can have been no more than 18 months old.
Lucky had no shoes, few clothes and was living in the kind of place familiarised by Slumdog Millionaire. The Sanjay slum is home to 11,000 people. There, people live in nothing more than dirt piles, children play in raw sewage and, until recently, there was no doctor within a 10-mile radius. I couldn't help comparing Lucky to my own son, but because of where Arlo was born, he was destined for a very different life.
But Lucky's life can, and is, being changed thanks to foreign aid. That is why it is fundamentally wrong to say that western aid is nothing more than a gimmick doing more harm than good. Tell that to the 500,000 people who were saved from dying from TB in 2007-08 thanks to foreign aid; to the four million Africans who have been placed on treatment for Aids since 2002, or the 40 million more children going to school. Those figures don't sound like a gimmick to me – and they hopefully don't sound like a gimmick to the many thousands who donated.
Of course it is right that the money we give should be spent effectively; it hasn't always been in the past. The government's aid review last week said there will be a much more focused approach, looking closely at programmes that have clear results, concentrating on fewer countries and backing the UN agencies that prove they are performing well. In terms of austerity at home, this emphasis on value for money is right. Aid programmes, like other areas of government spending, should be accountable and well-managed, and international development should not be used to further short-term strategic or commercial interests.
But this should not detract from the fact that Britain has a long and proud tradition of helping others. We cannot turn our backs on those who need our help.
For as little as giving up a daily latte or cappuccino we can stop people dying. It is that simple. In India – where, despite advances, there are still more poor people than in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa – a staggering two million children a year will die before their fifth birthday. That is a quarter of the global total. Aid programmes are literally saving lives.
Some argue India no longer needs or deserves British aid because its economy is booming and its government has even announced plans for a space programme. But the economic growth has so far brought very limited benefits to the worst off. Yes, we need to help India to move beyond its current dependence on aid, but to simply slash it would make India's poorest families still poorer and, put bluntly, cost many lives. At present, British aid is doing amazing things – saving children's lives, bringing healthcare and education, and creating the opportunity for economic and social progress.
In the rural town of Tonk, in Rajasthan, I recently met a baby called Desire. She was nine months old. Her mother was queuing to have her precious child vaccinated against diphtheria, polio and TB in a children's health centre. Desire was essentially being injected with a chance to reach her fifth birthday. Without that simple jab, she, like many millions, might be heading for an unbearably early grave.
In the Sanjay slum, once a week a Save the Children mobile clinic – a basic bus kitted out with two doctors, a nurse, a pharmacist and vital drugs – now pulls up and brings the only healthcare that thousands have any access to. It means that mothers, for the first time, can get their children's illnesses treated before it is too late. That bus is funded entirely by foreign aid. Lucky was in that queue. Perhaps his mother had foresight after all when she named him.
