Poverty perspectives of the DFID White Paper and the Australian Aid Review: implications for international training

✍ Scribed by Joseph Mullen

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 94 KB
• Volume: 19
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0271-2075
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-162x(199902)19:1<31::aid-pad52>3.0.co;2-z

✦ Synopsis

This article compares the approaches to poverty elimination adopted by the UK government White Paper on international development and the Australian government's review of its overseas aid programme (Ausaid Review). Both documents adopt sustainable poverty reduction/elimination as the key policy leitmotiv of overseas aid policy. However, a dierence of approach is in evidence. The UK White Paper ventriloquizes the DAC and World Summit social policy targets and ambitiously elevates its own departmental policy and values to that of government policy overallÐthough without specifying the instruments by which this consistency can be assured. The silence on the resource implications of the overriding objective of poverty elimination, in terms of budgetary provision, could create a credibility gap between intentions and programme implementation. The Ausaid Review, on the other hand, hones its cutting edge on the complex, often self-serving array of development programmes that are often lacking in focus and harboured from external scrutiny by an overprotective bureaucracy. The Review suggests the adoption of a single value statement of `poverty reduction through sustainable development' by which all programmes should be judged. The predominantly Australian-based tertiary education scholarship programme is criticized for pandering to domestic educational constituencies and re¯ecting a weak linkage to poverty reduction. However, in the ®nal analysis the narrow geographical focus of the programme, the privileged status of PNG and the level of tied aid remain substantially intactÐdespite serious question marks over their poverty content.