What Germany Can Learn From the UK’s Terrible Mistake

In no other quarter century of history has life improved so much for so many as in the last 25 years. Life expectancy has increased globally, and fewer people than ever live below the World Bank’s poverty line. This transformation has been made possible by the widespread dissemination of scientific and technological innovation, the global market economy, and improved standards of national governance. International collaboration too, especially through the work of global development organisations, also played an important part.

But now, an onslaught of crises and growing polarization worldwide threatens funding for international development. In 2020, the British government of Boris Johnson added to its long list of acts of wanton vandalism by abolishing the Department for International Development (DFID), for which I had previously served as Permanent Secretary. Likewise, Germany is being faced with something similar: the dramatic downsizing of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) as a result of budget cuts. I want to outline the importance of a ministerial department that oversees development aid, and the lessons Germany can learn from DFIDs abolition.

DFID’s merger with the Foreign Office was widely criticised by all of Britian’s leading political parties in Britain, including by the UK’s three living previous Conservative prime ministers, as well as across the world. Chinese officials asked why the previously predictable and rational British perpetrated an act of such self-harm. When Johnson was thrown out in 2022, a start was made to rebuild from the rubble to reestablish a respectable British contribution to global development. Now, the new Labour government is commissioning an independent review on how to build it back.

In our new book, The Rise and Fall of the Department for International Development[1], Ranil Dissanayake, currently senior fellow at the Centre for Global Development, and I have examined the DFID story. The British experience has lessons for how others might deal with the challenges of the modern world.

DFID’s achievements

DFID was created in 1997 on the first day of Tony Blair’s first Labour government. From the outset, the new minister, Clare Short, was adamant that her ambition was not merely to support international development broadly or as a general principle. She had a tighter, sharper, more precise focus. She wanted to take forward an agreement reached the previous year in the OECD to focus on supporting the very poorest: halving the rate of extreme poverty, getting every child into school, slashing infant and maternal mortality. She worked with her international counterparts, including the long-serving and widely respected German development minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, to have that approach adopted globally – and in 2000 it was, with the universal agreement in the United Nations of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Short and her successors focused the money that DFID managed – which grew from £2 billion (0.25% of Britain’s national income) in 1997 to more than £12 billion in 2019 (when Britain was meeting the UN target of 0.7% of national income going to aid) – on places where the largest numbers of the extreme poor lived. That is not all developing countries. DFID focused its effort on Africa and South Asia where the most extreme poverty persisted.

Over the following 25 years, incomes in those countries grew, the poverty rate fell, infant and maternal mortality was reduced, there was a huge expansion in basic education, and more people gained access to clean water and decent sanitation. Above all, people were living much longer: in Malawi, where I worked in the mid-1990s, life expectancy was just 43 years; by 2020 it had increased to 63 years. The years 1997 to 2020 saw dramatic progress in reducing global poverty.

DFID’s approach boils down to a determined focus on the causes of poverty and interventions that address them. The biggest cause of infant mortality, for example, was diseases that could be prevented through immunisation. DFID accordingly became the largest international financier of vaccination programmes. When it was discovered that children were out of school mostly because their parents could not afford the fees, DFID helped governments abolish school fees.

The lessons

The first is about the power of a clear, credible, ambitious long-term vision. The MDG goals – increasing incomes, reducing infant deaths, getting more children into school – were easy to communicate and intrinsically attractive to many people.

Second, building an organisation exclusively dedicated for an extended period of time to achieving the MDGs was crucial. DFID benefitted hugely from having ministers – both Labour and Conservative – for its first 20 years who backed the focus on extreme poverty. Thousands of experts from across the world came to work in the department over that period, mostly in its offices in developing countries, and all were imbued with the mantra of poverty reduction.

Just as important was the creation – and continuous updating and adjusting – of systems and processes, and a way of doing things that supported the achievement of the department’s goals. Deep expertise, evidence, analysis, and knowledge was valued and invested in. Good systems – project appraisal, monitoring, risk management, review, measuring impact – meant that money was spent in a way that ensured that goals were achieved.

Third, a credible, appealing vision, and a capable organisation could have achieved little without generous resourcing. A continuously growing and, after the early phase, a substantial budget for more than 20 years was essential for both DFID’s direct contribution to reducing poverty and its international influence.

A fourth lesson relates to partnerships. DFID understood that only through collaboration with others – inside government, other donors, decision makers in developing countries – could it achieve its goals. It invested in international partnerships with other donors, influential foundations, multilateral bodies, developing country leaders, and opinion formers.

Taking development seriously

There is a fifth and crucial lesson that ultimately overrides the others. A dedicated institution for international development only makes sense if you believe that international development is a valuable objective. Johnson’s government did not believe that, which is why it abolished DFID. It abandoned the consensus that helping poorer countries was not just a moral responsibility but that it would also lead to a world that was better for everyone else, too: richer, fairer, and safer for all. To the extent that it wanted to retain an aid programme at all, it was mostly to lubricate other shorter-term national interests – political, commercial, and security. Britain had already tried that approach in the 1980s and 1990s. It led to a series of scandals, often involving arms sales, which tended to undermine both diplomatic and developmental objectives.

It is still the case that those responsible for most of the world’s official development assistance (the US, Japan, the EU, France, and Germany, which between them account for 70% of the total) have separate institutions for their diplomatic and their development objectives. They recognise that the two can work hand in hand, but that they are each important in their own right. They understand that the skills, processes, culture, and systems needed for a top-class diplomatic service are different to those for a good development programme. Diplomacy is about relationships, languages, trade-offs, and finding common ground. It is often inevitably short term and reactive. Development policy is about long-term goals, money, evidence, analysis, and systems for delivering outcomes over a period of years.

It is clear that some influential people in Germany understand the mistake Britain made. Svenja Schulze, Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development, says that a separate ministry is necessary: "We saw that in the UK. When they abolished their own ministry, they were no longer present on the international stage," she said. She also clearly recognises the special skills and approach required for development: "That requires people with competence, and it also requires representation. All of that cannot simply be harboured in an economics ministry, a foreign ministry, or a finance ministry."

Often in life, we learn more from mistakes than successes. The UK is now trying to sort out its own mistakes; others can take profit by not repeating them.