Every penny we give in aid to Africa must be made to count

The point of aid is to make aid redundant. So said Gordon Brown on his return to the political arena at the weekend.

Speaking at a meeting of the African Union in Kampala, the former prime minister insisted that western donors shoul d keep the promises they have made to the world's poor but understand what development assistance was for. The point of aid was to kickstart business-led growth, not replace it.

Brown's intervention was timely. The budgetary constraints facing rich nations in the aftermath of the financial crisis mean all governments will be forced to take a hard look at how much they are spending on aid, what they are spending it on and why they are spending it in the first place.


The critics of aid will ensure that this takes place. They argue that too much aid is pocketed by corrupt elites. They argue that a good chunk of western financial assistance is wasted even when it doesn't find its way into numbered Swiss bank accounts. Above all, they argue that aid encourages a dependency culture. On all three counts, there is a case to answer.


In Britain, the debate is already hotting up, in no small part due to the legacy left by Brown to David Cameron. Labour enshrined in law a commitment to raise UK aid spending to 0.7% of GDP by 2013, a pledge that would involve the budget of the Department for International Development (DfID) increasing by more than 10% a year. Cameron, in opposition, said he would stick by the 0.7% target, making international development one of only two areas of spending ringfenced against cuts.



That makes Andrew Mitchell, the current development secretary, both a lucky and a marked man.

Lucky because he and the health secretary, Andrew Lansley, are the only ministers sitting round the cabinet table who will be spared the Treasury axe. Marked because the special status given to international development by the government will inevitably cause resentment among colleagues as they see their budgets cut even more deeply in order to ringfence poverty programmes overseas..

In his first couple of months in the job, Mitchell has been making all the right sort of noises about focusing the aid budget on countries that really need it, and making sure that the chunk of his budget – around half – that is channelled through international organisations such as the World Bank and the United Nations is spent wisely. But these are early days: the political heat will be turned up only when the comprehensive spending review on 20 October provides details of spending cuts in other Whitehall departments........

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