While still in power, the U.K.’s Labour Party did not enforce appropriate monitoring and evaluation measures of some 1 billion pounds (USD1.5 billion) in education aid to Africa and Asia, a report finds.
The Department for International Development failed to measure if this funding was helping increase school attendance rates in the two continents, according to a report by the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee.
“What surprised us was [DFID’s] lack of a coherent framework for assessing the impact and value for money of its spending and its willingness instead to rest claims of overall performance on selective examples and anecdotes,” Labour member of parliament Margaret Hodge, who chairs the committee, was quoted by Mail Online as saying.
U.K. Secretary of State for International Development Andrew Mitchell said the coalition government had established an independent commission to review aid spending.
>> UK Taps ‘Traffic Light’ Approach for Reviewing Aid Projects
“The Public Accounts Committee report finds serious evidence of failure in Labour’s years of government which coalition ministers are sorting out,” he said, as quoted by Mail Online. “This Government is determined to get maximum value for money from its aid and to show UK taxpayers how and where their money is being spent.”
