World Bank praises UK’s foreign aid

DAVID Cameron and George Osborne have been lavished with praise for maintaining Britain’s £12bn international aid budget in the face of economic austerity.

‘I think the decision to continue with the commitment to spend 0.7pc [of Britain’s total output] is extremely courageous a nd extremely welcome,’ World Bank president Jim Yong Kim, pictured, told the World Bank/IMF spring meetings yesterday.

The approval heaped upon the Government for its determined commitment to the foreign aid budget – at a time of continuing domestic austerity measures and while military spending is being severely curtailed – will go down like a lead balloon on the Prime Minister’s back benches.

Many believe that too much of the aid budget is being wasted on poor projects or ends up in the hands of corrupt leaders and dictators in the developing world.

The Korean-American boss of the World Bank is a former head of the Ivy League Dartmouth College and a professor at the Harvard medical faculty. His family are refugees from the brutal regime in North Korea.

Kim’s comments came against a background of increasing calls for the United Nations and World Bank to revisit the arbitrarily set 0.7pc figure – originally signed off by world churches in the 1950s – and focus much more on the quality rather than the quantity of foreign aid.

The budget for the Department for International Development, along with health and education, has been ringfenced from the government’s programme of fiscal austerity. But with the UK economy now predicted by the IMF to grow strongly over the next five years, the aid budget, set at a fixed portion of national output, will automatically soar by billions of pounds.

‘We work very closely with Dfid and Dfid has continued to grow in stature and reach, and their support has been critical both to us and the countries on which they i mpact,’ the World Bank president insisted. Kim said that foreign aid from around the world totals $125bn each year, but he added that the requirements ‘are so much greater than that’ and that ‘Africa alone has $100bn a year in infrastruc

ture needs’.