The United Kingdom’s new international development strategy was finally published last week. Coming on the back of shock cuts and changes to U.K. aid, and beset by delays, the strategy was long-awaited and finally landed in the midst of several global crises, including the war in Ukraine, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and worsening food shortages globally.
Did it rise to the occasion? “There are some good components,” Abigael Baldoumas, policy and advocacy manager at Bond, the U.K. network for NGOs, told the audience at a special Devex Pro Live event last week. But overall, “we’re disappointed at the lack of ambition and the way in which this strategy makes more clear than any previously how much development is now going to be in service of foreign policy and of the U.K. national interest, and that feels like an abdication of leadership on the part of the U.K.”
Baldoumas joined a panel alongside Devex’s U.K. Correspondent William Worley and Center for Global Development policy fellow Ranil Dissanayake shortly after the strategy was published, to discuss the ins and outs and what it could mean in practical terms.