Official Development Assistance

Baroness D'Souza Excerpts

Tuesday 13th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness D’Souza (CB)]

My Lords, worldwide cuts to international development programmes are a reality. We cannot escape the adverse effects this will have on poverty reduction, healthcare, education and, importantly, national security. Depressing as these statistics are, they enforce innovative, perhaps leaner, ways of delivering development assistance, and priorities must include a greater reliance on locally led development and local civil society organisations.

In its simplest form, development is a process of identifying viable local projects, establishing leadership which has the confidence of the community, and supplying money and expertise where requested. The final stage is to step away and begin again elsewhere. In short, this means supporting what people need and are committed to and helping the local community to get on with it. In nearly all societies, small-scale or otherwise, people make intelligent decisions about the welfare of their communities—of course, there are exceptions—and the job of the donor is to facilitate this.

I have spent much of my working life in remote and impoverished communities and observing the international development fraternity at work; money is often wasted, many projects fail in the short and medium terms and too little planning is based on evidence.

In 2001, in Afghanistan, I met a potential leader who had the intelligence, sensitivity and determination to achieve his dream of educating girls. All he lacked was funding; we began providing small amounts of a few hundred pounds, delivered here and there in brown paper envelopes. With this, he repaired buildings, created warm spaces in winter for people to congregate in, worked with parents to persuade them of the value of educating their daughters, and held classes on how to vote in the forthcoming election. A few more hundred pounds saw the construction of functional school buildings and increasing commitment from local families and businesses to support this programme, in which they had enormous pride. Teacher training and vocational courses were added, and female students began to attend universities in surrounding countries such as India and Bangladesh, and in Australia, Canada and the UK.

I see I have come to the end of my time so I will cut to the chase. The total contribution from donors here in the UK over a period of some 20 years was in the region of £140,000, including fees for consultant engineers and auditing help. In 2022 the Taliban returned. We continue to follow a pared-down development model in Afghanistan, albeit in different guises.

Development requires humility, evidence, trust and understanding of local cultural norms, as well as modest funds.