Advocacy

By Phil Vernon

At the end of November, 2,000 representatives of governments, international organisations and NGOs convened in Busan as the fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness. Just before the meeting we proposed five criteria by which to judge its outcome as far as conflict-affected and fragile countries are concerned

Our five criteria were:

A UN Summit in September will review progress towards the Millennium Development Goals. It will find that they are not going to be met by 2015 as planned. But rather than push for an “MDG Rescue Plan” as some are proposing, it is time to ask some hard questions about how societies change, and what we really mean by "development".

Full report

Last year International Alert’s Secretary-General Dan Smith was selected to review the UK Department for International Development’s policy on state-building and peacebuilding, an issue which is a bit of a hot topic in many of the countries where Alert works. Smith challenged some of the UK Government’s key assumptions and provided new ways of thinking about the interlinkages between state-building and peacebuilding.

This article is an abstract from Dan Smith’s contribution to the new Foreign Policy Centre pamphlet Tackling the world water crisis: Reshaping the future of foreign policy.

Water is a basic condition for life. We depend upon it for daily use, agriculture and industry. Both declining availability and quality as well as an excess of water undermines welfare, impairs human security and generates risk of conflict.

Letter published in The Guardian on 5 June 2010

Andrew Mitchell, the new secretary of state for international development, has announced a new regime of transparency and accountability in how Britain's aid is spent. Welcome as that is, questions remain about what to measure, which means discussing the aims, and how to do it without distorting those aims.

Taken from Dan Smith’s blog, which can be found at www.dansmithsblog.com

It can be safely predicted that ideas and the terms of discussion about international development will change fundamentally in the coming five years.  A major policy statement from the UK Department for International Development (DFID) marks an important milestone on this road, though it’s a long way from being the endpoint. In this very long post, I explore the White Paper and a way of taking DFID’s logic forward.

International Alert and the Royal Commonwealth Society (RCS) will be hosting a panel debate on the future of overseas development aid, Moving Beyond the Millennium Development Goals on September 8th at the RCS in London.

This event comes two weeks before the UN General Assembly will review progress against the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and coincides with the launch of a new International Alert report which questions the usefulness of the MDGs.

Heads of State will meet in New York on 20th - 22nd September this year to review progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which were agreed by UN Member States ten years ago to inspire increased investment and effort to improve people’s lives in developing countries. These include important measures such as infant and maternal mortality, school attendance, household incomes and hunger, amongst others.

Commenting on the outcome of the UN Summit on the Millennium Development Goals, International Alert’s Director of Programmes Phil Vernon says: “As we expected, the summit has ended with commitments of more funding, and a big push to get as far as possible in meeting the MDGs by 2015. But there is also widespread recognition that they will not be met, and that the international community still needs to face up to the challenge of how best to help people and institutions in fragile contexts to make sustainable progress.

International Alert’s submission to the International Development Committee Inquiry The 2010 Millennium Development Goals Review Summit: Looking ahead to after the MDG deadline of 2015

In this submission, we focus on looking ahead to after the MDG deadline of 2015, and: