Jessica from our UK office brings us this great bit of news!

In a packed House of Commons today, the Chancellor delivered the annual budget. We had been waiting eagerly to see what the results would be for development aid. With the current economic downturn affecting everyone, some worried that the development pot would be raided.

At lunchtime, we found out that Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling have kept their promise to the world’s poorest- they did not roll back their spending commitments even in these tough times. Chancellor Alistair Darling said Britain’s Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) budget would be £7.48bn for 2009/10 and £9.14bn for 2010/11, as proposed in last year’s Comprehensive Spending Review.

What does that mean? It means that the UK is still on track to keep its promise to devote 0.56% of national income to effective overseas aid by 2010. This is great news!

In reaction to the news, ONE Executive Director Jamie Drummond said the following:

“The Prime Minister and the Chancellor have shown true global leadership in keeping Britain’s promises to the world’s poorest. Britain is setting the standard for other G8 countries at a time of global crisis when effective overseas assistance has an even more vital role to play.

“This pledge reflects the British public’s firm belief that effective international aid is a smart investment in a fairer, more prosperous world.”

-Jessica Gomez-Duran

In his annual foreign policy speech to the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in London, Prime Minister Gordon Brown set out the five great challenges the world faces today. One of these challenges is meeting the Millennium Development Goals.

In the speech he said:

For now more than ever it is both our duty and in our interest to help meet the Millennium Development Goals. For we cannot solve climate change without Africa; nor can we solve the food crisis without Africa. We need a fully financed ‘energy for the poor’ initiative; where commercial sources of capital dry up support from the international institutions; and we need to support agricultural development in Africa, in the past feed the world meant that we helped to feed Africa. In future, if we do things right, we will do best by enabling Africa to feed the world.

He goes on to make some interesting statements in relation to sustainability and bringing the environment and development together:

This is why as we prepare for an ambitious post 2012 climate change agreement at Copenhagen, for which I pledge our Government’s unbending commitment, the European Union must, and I believe will, agree in December its ‘2020′ programme for energy and climate and show European leadership at its best. And I want the World Bank to become a bank for environment as well as on development, helping developing countries move towards sustainable energy paths of their own.

It’s great news that the British Prime Minister has explicitly made the Millennium Development Goals one of his top foreign policy priorities. Let’s keep him to his word.

Full speech can be read here.

-Jessica Gomez-Duran

Britain and France will today announce a joint initiative to help send 16 million African children to school in the next two years, in partnership with international football authorities.

The Guardian: Plan to put 16m African children into school

At the East African Health and Scientific Conference in Kenya on Wednesday, experts testified that constraints in the health sector are exacerbating health problems in rural communities. Some blamed conditions imposed by the International Monetary Fund in the early 1990s.

Daily Nation: Shortage of health staff hits East African states

An editorial by Michael Steele, former lieutenant governor of Maryland, appeared in today’s Washington Times. The piece praises President Bush’s work in Africa, noting that this story hasn’t made headlines in the United States but is making headlines around the world.

Washington Times: Bush’s Africa legacy

-Chandler Smith

On Saturday, Britain’s International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander called on the World Bank to focus more on fighting poverty in Africa.

From Reuters:

“We want a stronger focus on poverty reduction, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, and the gender issues of poverty. I have seen myself today the female face of poverty,” Alexander said after visiting a packed clinic near Makeni in Sierra Leone.

He administered polio vaccine to a baby and medicine to its mother — a gesture of help in an area where health workers said there are just two doctors for 321,000 people.

“The clinic is so tight (crowded) we have to use the ground for deliveries. It is not hygienic,” said Nabinta Koroma, a maternal child health worker, pointing to the filthy tiled floor covered in urine from a crowd of children waiting for checkups.

Britain sent troops to shore up Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown against a rebel threat in 2000, and then helped rebuild its security forces after a decade-long war fuelled by gems dug from the mud of its rich eastern diamond fields. British aid is now turning more to development projects than security in a bid to help the country’s poor, Alexander said.

Read the full piece here.