Britain should halt aid handouts to all but the poorest countries, MPs will say today.
In a major report, the Commons international development committee says it is ‘increasingly difficult to make the case’ for lavishing hundreds of millions of pounds on countries capable of standing on their own two feet.
Increasingly prosperous nations such as Nigeria, Ghana and Pakistan should be offered cheap loans rather than being given huge handouts by the British taxpayer, the report says.
And the Department for International Development (Dfid) should draw up a timetable for withdrawing aid altogether from all but the world’s most destitute states.
Britain’s aid budget has increased by 30 per cent in the past year to £11billion to hit David Cameron’s controversial target of spending 0.7 per cent of national income on foreign aid.
But the report reveals that the proportion of the budget spent in the world’s poorest countries has fallen from 85 per cent in 2006-07 to 65 per cent last year. MPs said they were ‘surprised to see a huge fall in the percentage of aid spending on low income countries’.
The committee’s Lib Dem chairman Sir Malcolm Bruce said future aid to so-called lower middle income countries should be targeted at encouraging private sector growth and should be ‘provided in the form of returnable capital wherever feasible’.
The report will fuel controversy about the 0.7 per cent aid target. It points out that, even before this year’s huge budget increase, Britain was spending almost double the average spent by developed countries on aid, Daily Mail informs.
