Recommendation 16

HM Government · verbatim extract Accepted

All UK ODA spending adheres to the international rules on aid as set and governed by the OECD DAC. These stipulate that all ODA spend must be administered with the promotion of economic development and welfare of developing countries as its main objective. The DAC rules ensure that aid statistics from member states are reported in a consistent and comparable manner. The UK’s ODA spend is guided by the International Development Strategy, which is closely aligned to the SDGs and focused on poverty reduction. Where aid is spent under the International Development Act, it requires that the Secretary of State must be satisfied that providing assistance is likely to contribute to a reduction in poverty. Recommendation 14: The UK Government must trust and fund what works. Policy and spend must be dedicated to interventions that deliver, at scale, to and with those most in need. Investing in long-term partnerships provides the key to long-term change. Should ODA levels stagnate, the requirement to ensure that assistance is well-spent becomes more critical than ever. The UK Government must be evidence-led in terms of spend, focusing on independently and internally assessed ‘best buys’, such as extreme poverty graduation, that deliver the most significant and sustainable returns on investment. On this basis, extreme poverty should represent more, not less, of official ODA spend. UK development policy and spend makes the best use of available evidence and assesses the strength of evidence carefully through independent and internal means. It is particularly critical that evidence guides effective spending at this point when global extreme poverty has increased due to COVID-19, and when domestic (developing country government) and external (aid) resources are under increased pressure. We do this though drawing on a range of external and internal evidence products, including the FCDO ‘best buys’. When delivering interventions at scale and where sufficiently strong evidence exists, development policy and spend focus on interventions which are known to have the highest value-for-money. Our Quality Assurance Unit and Investment and Delivery Committee have oversight to assure we do this. Where development challenges need to be addressed in areas with weak or missing evidence, we will look to invest in research and development to fill these gaps. Where a high-quality evaluation is possible that can determine the intervention’s effectiveness, we undertake this as described in the FCDO’s recently published Evaluation Strategy . The UK Government has been a leading funder of rigorous research to guide more effective responses to poverty, investing on average over £400m per year over the period 2015–2020 in commissioning and managing ODA-eligible research to address critical gaps in the evidence base. This includes impact evaluations which seek to identify and quantify the impact of development programmes on extreme poverty and identify innovations which improve effectiveness, as well as synthesis and summaries of the evolving evidence base and systematic reviews and cost-effectiveness comparisons to identify ‘best buys’. The UK has also been a leading funder of sustained research on cash transfers and graduation programmes; on programmes which can halve rates of violence against women and girls; and on girls’ education. In supporting research on these and other aspects of poverty reduction, we seek to build long-term relations with leading researchers, and support the strengthening of research capacity in developing countries themselves.