Hi John,
Our new report shows that the UK government is using aid money to fund fossil fuel projects, privatise healthcare and education services, and support companies facing serious allegations of human rights abuses.
Released on Saturday, Doing More Harm Than Good details the failures of the government’s little-known development bank, CDC, to invest in a just and responsible way. Despite a series of reforms and promises to change over the last decade, CDC continues to invest heavily in unaccountable private equity funds around the world, giving money to projects with dubious development impact to make a high rate of return. Already £6 billion of the UK aid budget has been transferred to CDC coffers, and this could rise to £12 billion in the coming years.
This is not development as we know it. CDC has continually failed to show how its investments are genuinely tackling poverty around the world. What’s more, our report shows that the aid money being channeled through CDC is actually exacerbating inequalities, damaging the environment and undermining human rights.
You can read my blog summarising our findings, as well as the full report itself, on our website now:
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Last week we discovered that the Department for International Development has survived the chop in the government reshuffle - but just for now. Friday’s Telegraph reports that the much-trailed merger of DFID and the Foreign Office has not been abandoned, only delayed until October.
What’s behind Boris Johnson’s desire to merge these departments is a belief that the UK aid budget should primarily serve UK businesses, not fight global poverty. As a result, CDC will take an even more important role as part of the government’s ‘Global Britain’ strategy in the months and years ahead. That’s why we must take a stand now - against CDC’s financialised, ‘market knows best’ approach to development - before it is too late.
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Already, more than 9,000 of us have signed the petition calling on Boris Johnson to end the corporate takeover of aid and ensure that aid is genuinely being used to tackle poverty and inequality. Can you join the campaign today?
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Since 2010 we have increasingly witnessed a highly financialised, market-based approach to development that puts the private sector first, with CDC at the cutting edge. This includes hundreds of millions of pounds of UK aid invested in private school chains since 2016, £22.5 million invested in an upmarket private hospital which treats international patients, and repeated investments in Feronia Inc, a company that manages oil palm plantations in DR Congo and is facing an ongoing murder trial involving a staff member as well as allegations of significant health and safety failures.
But it is perhaps the money that CDC is giving to fossil fuel projects that is the most shocking. Despite government claims to be aligning all aid spend with its commitments under the Paris Agreement, CDC has invested:
- $16.6 million in South African port operator Grindrod to facilitate the export of South African coal to China via Mozambique;
- $144 million in the coal-burning cement producer ARM Cement in 2016;
- And $39 million to build a power plant in Guinea, powered by heavily polluting heavy fuel oil.
These investments have been made on the basis of what will achieve a high rate of return for financial middlemen, not what is best for the world’s most marginalised communities.
This approach to development has to stop. Join us in taking a stand against this corporate takeover of aid and for a new development strategy that works in the interest of people and planet.
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Please sign our petition to help stop the corporate hijacking of aid now.
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Thank you,
Daniel Willis
Campaigner at Global Justice Now
READ MORE
[1] Doing more harm than good? Our latest report on the UK's development bank, CDC, 14 February 2020, https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/blog/2020/feb/14/doing-more-harm-good-our-latest-report-uks-development-bank-cdc
[2] Aid body CDC accused of wastefulness and secrecy in tackling poverty, 15 February 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/feb/15/cdc-commonwealth-development-accused-wastefulness-scerecy-poverty
[3] DFID and Foreign Office set for autumn merger after cross-government review, 14 February 2020
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/02/14/dfid-foreign-office-set-autumn-merger-cross-government-review/
[4] This is the real reason Boris Johnson wants to give the Foreign Office control over overseas aid, 26 December 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/foreign-office-dfid-merger-overseas-aid-uk-trade-global-development-a9260396.html
[5] A Dirty Investment, 25 November 2019, https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/11/25/dirty-investment/european-development-banks-link-abuses-democratic-republic-congos
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