Post-2015 Development Agenda

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Thursday 21st March 2013 Westminster Hall

[Hugh Bayley]

I stand corrected and congratulate the Government on moving in the right direction. The concern from the International Development Committee was that it will mean a substantial increase in spend in this year. We were concerned about the absorptive capacity, particularly in countries where we have bilateral programmes. That is something that the Minister might address later.

The International Development Committee has also voiced concerns about the squeeze imposed by the Treasury on DFID’s administrative costs. Like all Members I want to see every Government Department lean and mean, but as DFID is unusual in having a sharply rising budget, we are concerned that reducing the number of people DFID has on the ground runs a risk of our aid spend being supervised and scrutinised less closely, and possibly being less efficient as a result. That needs some creative thinking.

On my visits with the International Development Committee to DFID offices in the field, it has occurred to me that it is now harder for DFID staff to spend time away from the capital, looking at what is happening in health clinics or schools. Perhaps DFID could contract out to non-governmental organisations some of that work of checking what is happening on the ground and delivering reports on whether the training programmes for teachers in rural schools are delivering trained teachers. That is just a thought.

Having said that, I acknowledge that in the current economic climate it is not an easy political decision for the Government to stick to the commitment. Those of us who think it is the right thing to do have a responsibility to make the case for international development, in church halls and local newspapers up and down the country. Although there is a strong constituency of support, often church or faith based, for international development, and support from many diaspora communities in Britain, there are also many people who ask why we are increasing our charity abroad when we are not able to increase spending on some essential services at home.

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, and to the Backbench Business Committee, for initiating the debate. Does he agree that among young people—schoolchildren and students—there is tremendous enthusiasm for this subject? Nearly every primary school I visit in my constituency has displays about links with schools in the developing world. They seem as keen, if not more so, as any part of the adult population on the importance of those links, perhaps because they see the impact of poverty on children.

[Hugh Bayley]

I agree strongly. If we can win the hearts and minds of young people, we have a future on our side. The bold but right decision made by the Prime Minister and Government to raise our aid spending to 0.7% this year gives the Prime Minister great moral authority when he is involved in discussions with leaders of other countries. If the UK commits increased support to the world’s poor, we are in a position to argue that others should do so as well.

I want the Prime Minister to use that moral authority in the same way that Tony Blair and my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), the former Prime Ministers, used their authority. They decided to lead internationally the argument for debt write-offs, to increase aid substantially from 0.29% to 0.53% and to win commitments from other global leaders to do more for the world’s poor. It is particularly important for the Prime Minister to use that moral persuasion in his capacity as co-chair of the United Nations Secretary-General’s high-level panel, and in the G8 summit that he chairs this summer.

I want to talk a little more about the parallel I see with the last time the G8 was in the UK at the Gleneagles summit in 2005. The then Prime Minister Tony Blair put global development and climate change on the agenda. Many Members will recall the Make Poverty History campaign led by NGOs. It mobilised hundreds of thousands of members of the public in support of a demand to increase aid and make aid more effective. The Government’s determination, together with that support from civil society, led to a new partnership for Africa’s development.

On the one hand, donors such as the UK committed to double aid to Africa. That commitment was given by the G8 at Gleneagles and by the EU, which was under the UK presidency that same year, 2005. On the other hand, African leaders—led by Presidents Mkapa of Tanzania, Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and Obasanjo of Nigeria—gave commitments that, if the donors increased aid, leaders of African countries would do more to use that aid effectively. They established a number of peer review mechanisms—including the African Peer Review Mechanism—in which officials from one African country would audit the effectiveness of government expenditures and economic policies in other countries.

The single most important point I want to make this afternoon is that deals at international summits do not just happen. They do not happen because G8 leaders feel in a benevolent mood on the day and decide to put their hands in their pockets and double aid. It took two or three years of political mobilisation and preparation to deliver the results in the Gleneagles G8 and the British presidency of the European Union. That probably began in 2001—I remember the year well, because that was when Tony Blair sacked me from the Government. Rather nervously, he called me in afterwards to talk to him, and he asked what I intended to do. He had just made a speech about Africa and his commitment to do more to seek to reduce global poverty, and I said that I would like to do some work in that field. That was when, together with support from colleagues from other parties, we created the Africa all-party parliamentary group, and we worked closely with Downing street to identify what the UK could do in policy terms to build a better partnership with Africa.

About 18 months or so before the Gleneagles summit, Blair created the Commission for Africa—a team of eminent persons, the majority of whom were Africans—to write a proposal for improving development in the continent. They had a commission of some 36 people, headed by Myles Wickstead, who currently advises the Select Committee on International Development. They visited most countries in Africa and certainly met, as it says in the introduction to the report, representatives from 49 countries, as well as representatives from every G8 country and every country in the EU. I believe that the report was a turning point in the west’s relationship with Africa. It was soon out of print, because it was in great demand—in capitals—both in donor countries and in Africa, and Penguin Books printed a summary version in much greater quantities.

When the commission was doing its work, the all-party group on Africa sought to work with parliamentarians from other G8 and EU countries to explain what the UK Government intended to do, and to try and persuade our colleagues in the Bundestag, the Assemblée Nationale and Congress—the House of Representatives and the Senate—to ask questions of their Executive branch about how their country would respond to Blair’s proposals on increasing aid and improving the effectiveness of aid to Africa.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

It is a real pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Walker. I refer Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, particularly in respect of a number of all-party groups and my interests in working in Tanzania over many years.

Along with many Members, I welcome the commitment announced yesterday that the people of the UK will meet the 0.7% target that was pledged at Gleneagles and which, as the hon. Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley) rightly said, has been worked for over a number of years by the previous and current Governments. I congratulate the hon. Gentleman and the Backbench Business Committee on providing the time for today’s debate.

I want particularly to mention—I am glad he is here—my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley), under whom I served when he led the Conservative party’s policy review on international development back in 2006-07. He was committed to that particular target, and he produced an extremely thoughtful and detailed report, much of which, I am glad to say, this Government have put into practice. At the same time, I commend the noble Lord Howard who, as the first leader of the Conservative party to sign up to the 0.7% target, helped the party on its way to yesterday’s announcement. I ask the Minister if the Government will take the challenge to countries that have not yet met the target and which, at the moment, regrettably show no signs of doing so.

We heard just a few weeks ago that in the United States the 5% across-the-board cut to public spending applies to international development as much as to anything else—and it was only 0.2% anyway. We should encourage Germany and France, and indeed all other members of the European Union that do not do so at the moment, to match what the United Kingdom is doing. There are many honourable exceptions, particularly among the Nordic countries, and also the Netherlands, and we should be grateful to them for showing us the way.

We are talking today about the post-2015 millennium development goals. The MDGs were successful because they were simple and measurable and countries were able to take responsibility for them. They were things that people could understand, and there were not that many of them, and it is crucial, as the International Development Committee’s report states, that that should remain the case post-2015. We should not end up with 15 or 20 MDGs; we suggest a maximum of 10, but that is obviously open to negotiation. Nevertheless, however many we have, they should again be simple, clear and measurable, and be ones that people can buy into and take responsibility for. We should remember that it is because they are simple and measurable that they have been so successful. Let us not forget that 10,000 fewer under-fives die each day than in 1990, 33 million more children go to school than 10 years ago, and 12 times as many people have access to HIV/AIDS treatment as in 2003.

I have had the pleasure of going to a couple of meetings organised by the Africa all-party group and the Royal African Society over the past few weeks, including the one this morning, which the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford) mentioned, with Her Excellency Joyce Banda, the President of Malawi. We can see what the previous regime there was able to do to food security, simply by introducing subsidies for seeds and fertiliser. I remember clearly the famine in Malawi in 2006-07, because we had to send maize down from Tanzania as aid, to support people who were running short of food. Now the country is food-secure, and that is down to its Government’s development policy and the support of the UK’s Department for International Development and others, through the subsidy on fertiliser and seeds.

The president of the African Development Bank, Donald Kaberuka, was here last week. He has changed it from being a bit of a laughing stock of development banks to perhaps the leading one or one of the most respected in the world. He and his colleagues are doing tremendous work in funding private sector infrastructure and so on throughout the area for which they have a remit.

The Committee’s report makes it clear that no fragile state has yet achieved any of the millennium development goals, which is why Her Majesty’s Government’s commitment to spend a substantial amount of the aid budget in fragile states is so important. It would be so easy to get quick wins—to spend the money where the results can be seen. It is much harder to do good work, as DFID is doing with its partners, in fragile states and to get results, but it is the right thing to do as it helps some of the poorest people in the world. People in fragile states have the least chance of getting out of poverty. Post-2015, we must not scrap the MDGs or design completely new ones, but build on their success, improve them where necessary and maintain what has been shown to succeed.

I want to concentrate on jobs and health. My hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) covered the subject of jobs so well that I will cut down my prepared remarks and avoid duplicating hers. Jobs, whether in employment or self-employment, are absolutely key to getting out of poverty and they link our economy with those of developing countries: if those countries create jobs, we will, because if they create jobs, people will be in work and will spend money, creating markets for our goods.

I made the point in the House last week that I am not in favour of tied aid. Tanzania is one of our biggest aid partners: we are possibly its biggest contributor of bilateral aid—we are certainly its biggest investor, and we are its second biggest if not the biggest trader.

Three things go together—our support for the Tanzanian Government in the health, education and private sectors; our investment; and our trade, which also helps people in this country. This is win-win. If we help to create jobs and support those who are creating jobs, we support the creation of jobs in our country, which is just as vital. Development is not just something we do overseas and that has no relationship here; the two are absolutely connected.

The Chancellor highlighted trade figures in his Budget yesterday. Since 2009, our volume of trade with the European Union has risen by 5%, but with the rest of the world by 30%. Six of the top 10 fastest-growing countries are in sub-Saharan Africa, and most of the others are developing countries.

How can we help those who are trying to create jobs in the developing world? I want to concentrate on an area highlighted by my hon. Friend—I shall so describe him, as I have huge respect for his work over many years—the Member for York Central: agriculture. We have tended to view agriculture as somehow being different, or rural development as being something apart, with agriculture fitting into rural development. Agriculture is business. Those involved in small-scale agriculture are business women and men and should be viewed as such. SMEs is the “buzz word” for small-scale farmers, entrepreneurs who do fantastic things on almost no budget. We must help them or their Governments to assist with the creation of markets, improvements in productivity—irrigation, new seeds and fertilizer have already been mentioned—and processing.

Let us not forget that the Netherlands, one of the most successful economies in the world, was built on agriculture. Over the years, it went from being a producer to being a producer and processor, and then to being a producer, processor and trader and became the world hub for flowers, which it used to grow but now mainly trades. A substantial part of the Dutch economy is based on agriculture, yet it is not viewed as backward. Indeed, one of its financial institutions, the Rabobank, a co-operative agriculture bank, is one of the few banks to retain top status with all credit rating agencies. Many institutions in our country grew out of the agricultural sector and, unless I am mistaken, the United Kingdom’s biggest single manufacturing sector remains food and drink processing, based on the raw materials produced by our farmers. We should not move away from agriculture, but build on it as development occurs, which is so important in job creation, whether in employment or self-employment.

My hon. Friend the Member for Congleton mentioned finance. DFID has rightly begun to focus on different ways of achieving financial innovation in the developing world. The financial deepening challenge fund, with which I was involved some years ago, looked at different means of offering finance, whether through micro-finance or investment in small and medium-sized businesses. Sometimes, the problem is what we in the UK refer to as the “financing gap”. Funds are often available for micro-businesses and for large businesses, but the problem is in the middle, where the costs of finance are substantial—professionals need to be involved—and the cost per transaction is too high to make the transaction viable. Existing micro-businesses cannot grow into small businesses and then into medium businesses, because they come up against that brick wall. They can get the first $5,000 or $10,000, but the problem arises when they encounter the big gap and need $50,000 or $100,000 to employ substantial numbers of people. They are told to go to the banks, which require security that they do not have, and the venture capital or investment funds say, “$100,000 is too little for us”.

We are trying to crack the problem, but we have not done so yet. I believe that solutions are available—for example, leasing, because often a business needs equipment to create jobs, for which, although it can provide the working capital, it requires capital investment. I encourage DFID to consider that further.

Let us not forget that when we are discussing jobs, we are talking mainly about young people. There are 3.5 billion people under 30 in the world, 1.7 billion of whom are aged between 15 and 24, and they must be at the forefront of our mind. They can go through their education and find that there is nothing at the end, which is very dangerous. I urge that young people are placed at the forefront of consideration of the post-2015 MDGs.

I was talking yesterday to the chief executive of Y Care International, an international development organisation associated with YMCAs in Britain and overseas. It and many other youth organisations around the world are highly focused on the risk of leaving young people out of discussions, which are all conducted at a high level. It is great that the Prime Minister chairs a UN high-level panel on young people, but we must ensure that that results in action, not just in words.

Poor health is clearly both a cause and an effect of poverty, so it is crucial that we tackle it. Malaria can cost households 25% of their income, not necessarily through mortality, but through morbidity, the inability to work or lower productivity. The millennium development goals have led to substantial improvements in the treatment of diseases such as TB, malaria and HIV/AIDS. There have been improvements, too, in child and maternal mortality, both of which are very much affected by all those diseases. Malaria deaths have gone down by a third since 2000, but there are still far too many and the Prime Minister is focused on the UK helping to cut that rate still further. We must not forget that these are strong diseases, and they have a habit of returning. In the 1960s malaria was almost eliminated from Zanzibar, but people took their foot off the pedal and it came back with a vengeance. Work had to start all over again, which is why the MDGs, post-2015, must not lose their focus on those diseases, which can come back to strike us very quickly.

There are roughly 17 of the so-called neglected tropical diseases and they affect up to 2 billion of the world’s poorest. They are not necessarily killers, although they can be, but they are disablers. They strike the poorest and deprive them of their ability to earn a livelihood. There are simple ways of tackling them; the drugs exist. It is the distribution of those drugs that is the problem. We have seen fantastic co-operation between pharmaceutical companies, which have given many drugs for free, and Governments, as they tackle not just one disease but three or four at a time.

I went to Tanzania with the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) and the Minister of State, Department of Health, my hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb), over the new year, and we saw a fantastic programme run by the Tanzanian Government in which four neglected tropical diseases were being tackled together. We saw people with lymphatic filariasis who were disabled but able to lead pretty much normal lives thanks to the integrated programme. When we come to discuss how the MDGs, post 2015, deal with health, we must balance what our report calls an overall health goal with not losing the focus on those diseases against which there has been so much success over the past 10 to 15 years.

In conclusion, I welcome this debate and the tremendous work that DFID has done over many years on so many of these issues. We should celebrate what has happened over the past 13 years since the MDGs first came in, but recognise that that is just the start. This is something that we should not let go of but build on. We must maintain the simplicity and the measurability of our aims. I am talking about the fact that developing countries must buy into the goals; they should be not imposed on them, but developed in co-operation with them.

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is, as ever, a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Walker. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley) on securing the debate and on corralling the all-party parliamentary groups with a strong interest in this matter to make the important case for the British Parliament to have influence on the Prime Minister’s work in this area.

I chair the all-party group on Nigeria and, with Lord Crisp, I co-chair the APG on global health, so I have a strong interest in the area. I am proud to be a Co-op MP as well as a Labour MP, and a strong supporter of work that has been done on loans to small businesses and co-operatives in developing parts of the world.

Thirteen years ago, we set up the first millennium development goals, which were, as my hon. Friend said, a great triumph. They created huge momentum to tackle poverty, and I am delighted that the Prime Minister has such a key lead role in ensuring that we focus on the next development goals from 2015. It is his chance to make a place in history, and I wish him all the best in doing that. Let me add, too, my congratulations to the Government on delivering their 0.7% development aid target.

While I am on this roll of congratulations, let me also congratulate the Secretary of State on her commitment and business-like approach on the matter. She made it clear that part of her job, and the job of her team and the Government, is to secure good value for money for every single pound of aid spent. Taxpayers’ money is a valuable resource and we need to ensure that we provide value for money. I speak as a member of the Public Accounts Committee, which has looked into the matter, and the Committee will continue to challenge the Department to ensure that it achieves that aim.

The momentum to tackle poverty has made a big difference. In 2000, official development assistance was $72 billion. Between then and 2009, it rose to $128 billion. Although such rises cannot be put down to the MDGs alone, they have helped to focus our efforts. The figures have dropped in the last two years as a result of the global recession, so it is particularly welcome that our Government are showing the way and that the UK Parliament has backed them to send a signal to other developed countries that such assistance is important to global health, well-being and security.

In 2015, there will still be almost 1 billion people living on less than $1.25 a day. Moreover, the maternal mortality ratio has declined by less than 1% since 2000, so while the MDGs have made a difference, there is still a lot to be done. What should we be asking from the Prime Minister in his role on the high-level panel, and what should the focus be? One of the interesting issues is around inequalities, because while the millennium development goals focused rather a lot on averages, those averages can mask inequalities. An average reduction can mask a lack of progress among the very poorest people, and that needs to be in the panel’s minds when it makes recommendations.

There also needs to be thought about how measurement is conducted. It can be easy to go for goals that are seemingly easy to measure, but that measurement must be achievable at a local level. When measuring progress on development goals, there must be some understanding of the local challenges. I will touch a little later on some of my experiences in Nigeria, because even within one single nation, various states face different challenges. Moreover, the goals and indicators cannot be vague. We need to be clear about outcomes and what the new goals achieve.

Several hon. Members have discussed the key matter of local participation and empowerment. Development must involve working in partnership with countries, rather than being something that is done to countries. The all-party group on global health produced an interesting report about empowering health workers. It is important that, as well as passing on useful lessons to other countries, we learn lessons for our own national health service. In Malawi, for example, we see a desire, with strong political leadership, to increase the number of midwives and reduce maternal mortality. Wherever we are in the world, we can all learn from that driving political force. Many countries produce policies out of necessity. Lower level health workers are therefore empowered, trained and supported to provide early interventions that can save lives, whereas we tend to follow a more hierarchical model, notwithstanding some of changes that have been made in recent years to empower our nurses. We must learn from each other and not be seen to be doing things to other countries.

Agriculture is important—I will touch on that in a bit more detail in a moment—and integrating climate change policies into the development goals is critical. In Nigeria, for instance, the Government are parcelling up areas for private companies to deliver to the grid, which will provide a welcome boost to the power sector, but if that is not done in a green way, we will be shooting ourselves in the foot as we try to maintain our commitment to international climate change obligations. The Prime Minister must consider such matters as he leads the high-level panel. The panel is meeting soon, so this debate is timely and will, hopefully, help the Prime Minister to realise that he has support from Britain, as well as giving him some ideas.

I am heartened that 60 lower and middle-income countries have run national and regional consultations in an attempt to achieve a more meaningful input and to buy into the process. That will hopefully lead to a joint method of working, rather the goals being imposed on them.

A separate process is under way to agree global sustainable development goals. There will be a report on those goals at some point between this September and September next year, but there is no firm date for it yet. Those goals may significantly overlap with the post-millennium development goals, so it would make sense to bring the two sets of targets together at some point. I hope that when the two sets are being drawn up, each group will be thinking about the other group’s work.

I want to focus on health. The process of developing post-2015 goals is ongoing, as I said, but there seems to be reasonable agreement about what the overall list of goals should contain. However, there is not yet a clear consensus on what their hierarchy should be, and on what the headline goals and sub-targets will be. The hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) said that the International Development Committee’s report recommended not having too many goals.

The all-party group on global health hosted a fruitful session with a lot of development agencies and others with an interest in this area. The event was standing room only in one of the larger Committee Rooms in the main House, and we heard a long list of suggestions for new MDGs. The Prime Minister’s challenge is to ensure that the list of new MDGs is not so long that it becomes meaningless, thus allowing people to hide behind what they are doing rather than what they ought to be doing. That will be the political challenge, but it is not an easy one to face.

I fear that health issues are unlikely to be as prominent in the headline priorities of the new MDGs as was the case with the original MDGs, when of course they constituted three of the eight goals—on child mortality, maternal health, and HIV/AIDs and malaria. It is vital that people continue to make the case that global health issues should not be neglected in the future list of priorities, which is partly why I am speaking in the debate.

We need a joined-up approach to improve health. The many single disease-specific goals in the MDGs were successful at focusing global attention on critical areas that might otherwise have been neglected, such as malaria. However, they also were in danger of creating silos of activity that were a barrier to building strong overall health systems, so the post-2015 agenda should correct that by emphasising the need for joined-up, holistic health services, in addition to placing a stress on the importance of programmes to prevent people from becoming ill in the first place.

Of course, those aims are also important for reducing poverty, because those in poor health will be poorer. For instance, if we look at just the impact of polio alone, a disabled child in Africa is a burden on their family as they will be unable to work and support themselves, and that of course affects their life expectancy considerably.

Health must be central to development. Good health is critical to achieving the other development goals, so it must not be neglected. Healthy populations are more productive, not only because people can go out to work, but because ill health is a cause as well as a consequence of poverty. The World Health Organisation estimates that catastrophic health costs push 100 million people into poverty every year. We cannot make development progress in any sphere without addressing health needs.

Many believe that we will end up with one stand-alone post-2015 goal for health, and some consensus is forming behind the idea that it will involve universal access to health care. It came out strongly from the meeting of the all-party group on global health that was held before Christmas that that goal would suffer from focusing on a process rather than an outcome, and would be in danger of diverting attention towards addressing the financial barriers that stop people from receiving health services, rather than the quality of those services. In addition, it could ignore the wider determinants of health in society.

Arguably a better goal would be on improving the life expectancy of the bottom 25% relative to the rest of the population, because that would focus on those in greatest need and ensure that we did not water down the aims on which there is a fairly strong consensus—certainly in this House and among a lot of the groups that came to the all-party group’s meeting and submitted their thoughts. That goal would have the advantage of focusing on outcomes, addressing the critical issue of health inequalities, and being equally relevant—this is a very important point for the post-2015 agenda—for high, middle and low-income countries. It could be applied across the board, and it is important that we look at the post-2015 MDGs in that context.

That goal would also be flexible by allowing each nation to decide what aspects of health are the greatest priority for improvement. We can consider the Malawi situation in that context, and there are interesting challenges in different parts of Nigeria, which is, of course, a federal country in which there are big differences between states. For instance, the transmission of HIV and AIDS is affected by the multiple marriages in parts of the country. Sadly, other parts of the country are still affected by polio. I visited Niger state about a year ago and met the governor, who has determined that every child in the state will receive a polio vaccination. However, not every governor in the country takes the same approach. Indeed, such a policy is a challenge for governors in many states, including Niger state, because of their rural districts.

I will not detain Members by talking about just Nigeria, but I saw in Niger state and other parts of Nigeria that strong political leadership can make a big difference. When the new MDGs and the post-2015 agenda are developed, we need to ensure that we allow room for local political leadership to work within the framework, It is about not emasculating that local leadership, but empowering it and the people to whom it is accountable, at federal as well as national level. We must remember, as I have said, that states in countries such as Nigeria can face different challenges.

I will touch on the issue of education. I have had the opportunity to visit the Minna teacher training college in Nigeria. In parts of Nigeria—not all parts, because it is such a diverse country—not enough girls are going to school. In recognition of that fact, with support from Save the Children and other NGOs, girls are being educated to become teachers, because in some rural areas, girls were not going to school because there were not enough female teachers. I met a number of young women at the college, many of them mothers themselves, and in many cases with their babies, who were training as teachers. They were in a separate compound from the rest of the college with barbed wire to protect them so that their fathers, brothers and husbands could be sure that they were safe and in an acceptable environment for a young Muslim woman. Having gained that education themselves, the idea was that they would go back to their villages and then more girls would go to school there.

I then had the privilege of visiting a village school. Parents had formed a committee to run the school, and part of their focus was to ensure that they were aware of any children not in school so that they would get into school, because education is highly prized in Nigeria.

That local school committee had been empowered and it was very interesting to talk to its members. In some ways, it was a bit like talking to a parent teacher association in Hackney, because the parents in Nigeria were equally focused on and proud of their three-year-old who could count, or equally determined that their under-five would receive some support or that their teenage girl would go on to do something. Those are the same sorts of aspirations that the parents I speak to every day in Hackney have for their children, so there is no particular difference.

The hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) made a number of sensible points about jobs, because where do those young people in that village near Minna go on to? One of the really interesting issues in Nigeria, as in other parts of Africa, is agribusiness. I am delighted that our Prime Minister and President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria have signed a bilateral agreement to double trade from its level a couple of years ago by 2015. That is a very big challenge, but it is also a important issue, partly for this country—we need to create jobs and opportunities for our own businesses—and also because there is a very young population in Nigeria that needs work and opportunity. We already have interesting bilateral arrangements for skills development. Highbury college, Portsmouth, has a relationship under which people in Lagos are trained to certain levels of skills.

Agribusiness is an underdeveloped area, certainly in Nigeria and, judging from what the hon. Lady said, also in other parts of Africa. I am not entirely convinced—perhaps the Minister will comment on this—that the British Government have “got it” on the issue. Do we have the skill base to export as a business, in terms of food processing, development and so on? In one state in Nigeria, Zimbabwean farmers were brought in to help to improve the agricultural process and build it up. There are some excellent resources in Nigeria—land, people and produce—that could be developed, yet Nigeria is importing rice and coffee, whereas in the past it was a net exporter of those products. Big improvements could be made through bilateral trade links as well as through aid.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

The hon. Lady is making a very strong case on this issue. Indeed, when I and other colleagues were in Afghanistan, we saw great opportunities for the Afghan people to carry out their own food processing. At the moment, the raw materials go outside that country to be processed in other countries, and then they come back as commodities, which reduces job opportunities and increases prices in Afghanistan.

[Meg Hillier]

Of course, that process it is not very green, either. To go back to my comments about climate change, we should be shortening the food chain when it is sensible to do so.

DFID has done some good since it was established, but we need more joined-up government. The post-2015 agenda must not just be regarded as just DFID’s responsibility. The whole of the Government needs to engage in it—whether the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on agribusiness, or the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.