The Department for International Development has given Bond a grant of £4m as part of a new partnership aimed at strengthening safeguarding and transparency practices at international aid charities.
DfID said the announcement was part of its wider UK Aid Connect programme, a grantmaking initiative initially launched in July 2017, which will run until 2021. The government will be providing grants to “address the key development challenges in selected priority areas such as disability, child labour, modern slavery and working towards global security and stability”.
The government announced yesterday that it had made a £4m grant to Bond, the umbrella body for international aid organisation in UK, to "create innovative solutions to the global challenges we face and strengthen charities’ processes to ensure that the highest standards of transparency and safeguarding procedures are in place to protect vulnerable people".
UK Aid Connect aims to address a number of issues globally. It is a two phased programme which will seek to address such issues as “promoting sexual and reproductive health and rights, disability inclusion, global security and stability and tackling child labour and modern slavery.”
Phase 1 of the programme was due to be rolled out in January 2018, according to DfID’s website. DfID has been contacted to ascertain whether the first round of grants for UK Aid Connect have been rolled out.
The programme is designed to encourage “British charities to work collaboratively, share resources and bring together knowledge, practice and expertise to solutions to some of the most difficult development problems in a rapidly changing and complex world.”
Aid charities must have ‘the will to change’
The announcement follows a speech given by Penny Mordaunt, international development secretary, at Bond’s annual conference on Monday. Delivering the keynote, Mordaunt said that the ongoing scandal of sexual exploitation by aid works, shows that sector “failed to put the beneficiaries of aid first”.
She has said the aid sector must have “the will to change”.
“How did those, there to protect, support and serve the most vulnerable people on earth, become complicit in their exploitation – by protecting the perpetrators, by failing to grip the problem or turning a blind eye?
“Because we failed to put the beneficiaries of aid first.”
She speculated that fundraising pressures, competition for contracts, and protecting the reputation of individual charities and the sector had led to people not speaking up.
“The result was the grotesque fact of aid workers sexually exploiting the most vulnerable people, and threatening whistle-blowers if they protested,” she said.
She also warned that aid charities needed to “raise their game”.
|
Related Articles
