‘Foreign aid’ fund was spent on jazz and dance to meet targets

A FUND of £735million that paid for academics to research South African literature, Roman history and jazz was rebranded “foreign aid” as David Cameron sought to meet his 0.7 per cent international aid target, an official watchdog has revealed.

The taxpayer-funded Newton Fund’s budget also rose from £75 million a year before the aid commitment became law to £735 million afterwards.

The Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI) report said the fund’s “repurposing” was not “accompanied by any significant change to its design to reflect its primary purpose of promoting international development”.

In its nine-month review of schemes backed by the fund, the watchdog said that as a result there were “serious deficiencies” where projects were apparently wrongly being classed as foreign aid when there was little evidence they were helping to tackle world poverty.

The watchdog also found that nearly 90 per cent of the Newton Fund’s money remained in Britain despite its claim that all its £735 million should be classed as overseas aid. The watchdog concluded that it could not “say with confidence” that this was the case.

The disclosures will raise questions over how and whether the Government is reaching its legally binding commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of GDP, £14.5billion a year, on overseas development assistance (ODA).

The fund was originally planned as a business project to promote Britain’s collaboration on research and innovation with middle-income countries such as Brazil and China.

It initially had £75million a year to spend over five years to 2019, but in the government’s November 2015 spending review, published the same month as the UK’S new 0.7 per cent aid strategy, its budget and timespan was increased to £735million until 2021.

“Our survey found that, in practice, most of the UK ODA stayed in the UK for the benefit of UK institutions. Only 11 per cent of UK funding appears to be spent inside the partner countries,” said the watchdog.

Nearly a quarter of the spending went on student fellowships, including £81,000 on the adaptation of South African novelist JM Coetzee’s work into dance, painting and music, £73,000 on studying South African jazz cultures and £99,000 on analysing discourse on cult statues in the work of Cicero. Almost none of the grants benefited institutions in poorer nations.

“There is therefore reason to doubt that this form of support meets the poverty reduction test in the International Development Act,” said the ICAI.

The Department for Business said it would carefully consider the report, adding that the fund was “at the forefront of life-saving research helping the world’s poorest”.

The Department for International Development said all UK aid spent by any Government department must meet international guidelines on what constituted ODA.