Mark Lowcock on how extreme poverty fell off UK aid's radar

As the U.K. government embarks on what many fear will be a third round of cuts to international development programs, an uncertain future lies ahead for the country’s once-lauded aid project. Mark Lowcock, speaking to Devex before the latest announcement suspending aid funding, said he believes there is a “real worry” that the world is leaving behind the global agenda of tackling extreme poverty — an agenda he said the U.K. used to be a “leader” on. “It's quite shortsighted because the consequence will be [that] the problems that start in these very impoverished and stressed places will spread,” he said. Since his departure last year from the job of United Nations undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator — a role situated at the heart of humanitarian relief and related diplomacy — Lowcock has been outspoken about what he sees as the faults within the international system. Unusually for a former senior civil servant, Lowcock has been particularly critical of the government he worked for much of his career, including as permanent undersecretary of the now-closed Department for International Development from 2011 to 2017. Globally, “the clear priority was extreme poverty” between the 1990s and mid-2010s, said Lowcock, but “we've drifted away from that as the clear priority now.” During that time, the U.K. “was certainly a leader in making extreme poverty a clear priority, and making sure no one's left behind, and finding new ways of trying to help the weakest, poorest countries,” he said. But now, the U.K. government has made the “political choice” to “slash the aid budget and decide that the public finances need to be saved on the backs of the world's poorest people,” said Lowcock. “No other rich country government made that choice.” The real-world effects of this have been severe. It is “absolutely clear” that cutting U.K. aid to countries like Yemen, South Sudan, and Somalia has been “definitely increasing the loss of life [from humanitarian disasters]. There's no question about that,” he said. Combating extreme poverty had scant mention in the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office’s latest international development strategy, and aid to Africa — where most of the world’s lowest-income people live — has been cut. With the leftover aid, the U.K. government’s priority is to invest in the private sector and also create opportunities for British businesses. Lowcock, who is now a distinguished nonresident fellow at the Center for Global Development, spoke with Devex about his reflections on the field to mark the release of his book “Relief Chief: A Manifesto for Saving Lives in Dire Times.” The same conversation also revealed a major news story. Extreme poverty and its fallout, in one way or another, are themes that run throughout the book. Lowcock gave Devex the example of increasing numbers of Afghan migrants trying to enter the United Kingdom in small boats after their country fell to the Taliban, a contentious political issue in Britain. Extreme poverty is also a prominent feature of Africa’s Sahel region, and Lowcock has said that he fears the Sahel is “very close to a tipping point.” This is due to the confluence of “conflict and insecurity, weak governance, chronic underdevelopment and poverty, demographic pressures, and climate change.” “If you stick your head in the sand and don't engage internationally to try to contain these problems, you find you've got a different, really intractable problem to deal with instead. And migration is just one example,” he said. “But these failed states have been terrorist havens. They're places where organized criminals like to work from.” But Lowcock is convinced that “the single biggest step for a human being in extreme poverty is the first step” of increasing their income from one dollar to two, and he said this improves quality of life “a lot more” than going from two dollars to a higher figure. “Having that focus on those who are really at the very, very bottom, is … the biggest return you get,” he said. Even without spending any more money, there are many ways of “minimizing extreme suffering and lifelong impairments and saving lives,” said Lowcock. “And it would be good if we get everybody back onto that agenda.” A “significant problem” is that much aid spending currently goes to “places where it doesn't make a big enough difference, particularly in middle-income and better-off countries,” he continued. Lowcock accused multilateral development banks of having “drifted away from what should be their core mission.” “They find it much more comfortable to keep doing lending to middle-income or successful low-income countries who don't really need the money to the same extent, rather than focusing the bulk of their effort, as they should do, on the very poorest countries with the biggest problems,” he said. While there have been “baby steps” toward addressing that, the MDBs “don't go nearly far enough,” added Lowcock. Taking up the challenge seriously would also require not just reorienting resources, “but developing different ways to help these very poor countries. And the institutions would need different sorts of people working in them. They would need processes which were much smarter.” “The world is in a phase where it's harder to get people to live up to the commitments they've made.” --— Mark Lowcock, distinguished nonresident fellow, Center for Global Development There is some hope for the extreme poverty agenda in France, Germany, and the current U.S. government, where Lowcock said arguments in favor of tackling the issue “are much more prominent in the minds of policymakers.” “So I think you just have to keep making the arguments and hope for the day where things get better addressed by a wider group of countries,” he said. In the current era, “governments in lots of places, when it comes to dealing with domestic problems, make a calculation about what they can get away with,” added Lowcock. He gave the example of Myanmar, which has so far been “vindicated” in its decision to commit “ethnic cleansing” against the country’s Rohingya minority — and thereby also cause a refugee crisis for its neighbor Bangladesh. Dealing with this new context requires policymakers to “understand that's the world we're now in,” said Lowcock. “The second thing you have to do is keep reminding people why those values and principles were written down in the first place. The U.N. charter has a set of aspirations and goals that everybody subscribed to. And you do have to keep articulating those, including the associated things on the laws of war and what is not acceptable in wartime.” This remains important even if guilty parties cannot be persuaded to change their behavior, he said. “The next thing [that] is really important to do is gather evidence on atrocities … [so eventually] you've got a means of achieving accountability,” even if that may appear hopeless while conflicts are ongoing, added Lowcock. He cited trials at The Hague for Bosnian war crimes and Germany’s prosecution of crimes committed in Syria. “Those are things you can do,” he said, “[but] there's no getting away from the fact that the world is in a phase where it's harder to get people to live up to the commitments they've made.”