Question to the Department for International Development:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, with reference to the finding that her Department overestimated the number of maternal lives its programmes had saved during the 2011 to 2015 by 23,000 lives on page 25, paragraph 4.26 of the Independent Commission for Aid Impacts report of October 2018, Assessing DFID’s results in improving Maternal Health: An impact review, if she will make an assessment of the implications for her policies of that finding.

We welcome the Independent Commission for Aid Impact’s impact review on assessing DFID’s results in improving maternal health. The recommendations will feed into DFID’s strategic planning.

The report is right that we revised our estimate down as our information changed. Models continually incorporate better data as it becomes available. The maternal lives saved figure reduced when better data from Bangladesh and Ethiopia became available. Additionally, results from a large multi-country programme were excluded to avoid any potential for over-estimation.

A full update is available in this report: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/update-on-results-achieved-by-the-dfid-between-2011-and-2015