27 April 2009
"Thank you Simon for that kind introduction. And let me begin by paying tribute to your work with the NDN.
Over recent years, many of us have come to recognise the centrality of NDN to Democratic politics here in the United States, and both the election of a new Administration and the need for responses to the financial crisis of recent months, suggest to me that NDN will be an even more influential forum for ideas and fresh thinking in the years ahead.
Yet as we look ahead to the challenges for today and tomorrow, we remain shaped by our history. It is now almost eight years since the terrible attacks on the Twin Towers here in this great city of New York.
And ever since that tragic event Britain and the United States of America, as so often in our history, have stood shoulder to shoulder. For as the outpouring of sympathy, solidarity and support that day confirmed, though we may be separated by the thousands of miles of the Atlantic, we are not only bound together by ties of friendship and kinship, but we are also united by shared values of justice, liberty and democracy.
And as we move towards the end of the first decade of the 21st century, these shared values and common understanding continue to guide us.
A little under two years ago, in a speech to the Council of Foreign Relations in Washington, I said that in the 20th century a country’s might was too often measured by what it could destroy. But in the 21st century, strength should be measured by what we can build together.
Earlier this year in his inauguration speech President Obama said that our power grows through its prudent use. Our security emanates from the justness of our cause; the force of our example; the tempering qualities of humility and restraint. And nations will be judged on what they can build, not what they destroy.
Today, as we witness conflict from Darfur to Somalia, and from Afghanistan to Sri Lanka, that proposition endures.
So in my remarks this afternoon, I want to reflect on the work that our nations are together taking forward in Afghanistan, before suggesting that the international community needs to urgently change its approach to helping building peaceful states if we are to tackle global poverty effectively.
The setting for this speech and our remembrance of the events of 9/11 should remind all of us of the reasons for our joint mission in Afghanistan – to protect our national security by confronting the terrorism of Al Qaeda, and the Taleban who sheltered and supported them in their murderous endeavours. We meet here today just one month after nearly 90 countries and international bodies gathered in the Hague to support President Obama’s new strategy for Afghanistan, and the commitment of an additional 21,000 US troops.
So I want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to America’s renewed international leadership – which is both welcome and crucial – and to the courage, professionalism and heroism of your servicemen and women, along with our own, who are risking their lives every day in pursuit of Afghanistan’s freedom.
The US and the UK, as the two largest providers of troops, are working together in pursuit of one shared mission: to help Afghans overcome the insurgency and secure, govern and develop their country for themselves.
And in the last seven years, some real progress has been made:
Six out of 10 Afghans exercised their democratic rights by voting in elections for the first time in more than 35 years. Five million refugees have been able to return home Six million children are now enrolled in school, compared to just one million boys in 2001. Where just one in 10 Afghans lived in districts with access to basic healthcare, that figure is now up to eight in 10.
Behind these statistics often lie extraordinary human stories. Stories of courage, perseverance and possibility. I remember visiting a school near Kabul last year and talking to a 10-year-old girl called Zamina. She told me her friends now have aspirations to become doctors and teachers – raising their sights above the wildest dreams of their mothers – and Zamina herself told me of her desire to become a policewoman to serve her country and its people.
Just eight years ago under the Taleban it was illegal for girls like Zamina even to attend school in Afghanistan. Now she is one of roughly two million girls enrolled in schools across the country.This progress is all the remarkable when we acknowledge the continuing and very real perils afflicting the country. In the last six months, many Afghans have become more pessimistic about their personal safety and their country’s prospects for moving forward. Violence still stalks the south – including beheadings, kidnappings, suicide bombings and attacks on civilians, including teachers and the girls they teach.
As Hanif Atmar, Afghanistan’s Minister for the Interior told me, Afghanistan is facing simultaneously four scourges that would individually trouble any country in the world: narcotics, poverty, insurgency and weak governance.
That is why my Department – the Department for International Development – is working across the waterfront to help the Government of Afghanistan meet these challenges. We provided £134 million in support to Afghanistan last year and are committed to providing a further £510 million up to 2013. Our support focuses on three of the Afghan government’s own objectives: building state institutions, improving economic and aid management and improving the livelihoods of poor people.
We are putting statebuilding at the centre of our work by, for example, helping the government to increase its own revenue and to strengthen its budget systems. For the same reason we provide at least half of our assistance through the Government of Afghanistan’s budget. By working through the government we can strengthen it: working around it would weaken it. Afghanistan has never had a strong centralised government. But sustainable peace and the eventual exit strategy from our development effort depends on helping to create a stronger government that has credibility with its people. So we are increasing our help for core state functions including the Presidency, local government and the justice system as well.
The geopolitical importance of Afghanistan inevitably makes it a foreign policy priority – for the US, the UK and all our NATO allies. But we are united in our understanding that we cannot focus on Afghanistan alone. The border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan is of critical importance, and it is therefore vital that we support the democratically elected governments on both sides of that border in their efforts to tackle extremism, terrorism and poverty. Instability around the border areas destabilises both countries. And the threat of conflict can only slow progress towards the Millennium Development Goals. Despite some recent improvement, Pakistan is already lagging behind the rest of the region in tackling health and education inequalities. So we in the UK are doubling our aid to Pakistan to £480m in the years to 2011. We’re planning to spend £250m on education and around half of that will go to the border areas. But we won’t be naïve about what we can achieve on our own. Pakistan will have to provide the political leadership to resolve its own problems - and the role of the United States, with its much greater resources, will be crucial.
Today I want to suggest that this rightful focus in Afghanistan and Pakistan on strengthening security and governance holds a vital lesson for wider efforts to tackle global poverty.
In the 1990s half of the countries where life expectancy, education standards and income went backwards had been involved in violent conflict. And research has shown that a single civil war can cost the same as the sum sent spent annually on development aid worldwide.
Indeed, civil war leaves a country on average 15 per cent poorer
Half of all the children who die before the age of five are born in fragile states And civil war is more likely to break out in low-income countries – so there is a vicious circle of poverty leading to violence leading to more poverty.
Not only do these fragile states face the greatest development challenges, they also export their problems. Conflicts all too often spill over borders, destabilising entire regions. And an outbreak of disease in a fragile state can swiftly drag in its neighbours - as we saw with the spread of cholera from Zimbabwe to South Africa.In response to this challenge many donors, including the UK, have already shifted additional resources towards fragile states. But my key point today is that fragile states don’t just need more money, they need a different approach to help them tackle the root causes of their fragility.
And in contemplating this different approach, we should also remember that, while the challenge of reducing conflict is great, it is not insurmountable. Armed conflicts around the world are down by more than 40% since the early 1990s. Some 100 conflicts have ended since 1998. And according to the University of British Colombia’s research, the international community – and especially the UN – has played a key role in helping bring peace to war torn peoples.
But if we are to resolve those conflicts that persist, we must help to provide opportunities for the poorest so that they have choices in life, to ensure that resorting to violence, gun running or kidnap are not their only options.
Somalia provides a clear example. It has become infamous for the pirates that plague its coastline. And I say that with some feeling, as one of my own constituents from the community I represent in the British Parliament was a recent victim of their criminal activities. So I welcome the fact that the US, UK and European Union continue to contribute to international efforts to combat that threat. But we have to acknowledge that the piracy is a direct reflection of the crisis afflicting the country – a crisis brought on by 18 years of conflict and the almost total collapse of the state.
We therefore have a shared interest in helping the Somalis rebuild their state. And we must offer Somalis a reason to hope for a better future, by creating jobs, especially for young people. If we can’t provide opportunities for people to earn a secure living, the risk of fighting for a warlord or an extremist group or taking your chances on the Indian Ocean might seem worthwhile. That is why we are stepping up our contribution to employment generation programmes, through UN agencies like the ILO - which has already created 90,000 work days for young men and women in Somalia, through small schemes like road building in Eyl district, where most of the pirates come from.
Somalia is an extreme example of the challenges which face many poor countries, but it is worth remembering that we ourselves face many of the same challenges. Wherever we live – whether it’s Baltimore, Brixton or Basra – there are people who will pay our children to pick up a knife, or a handgun, or an AK47, and to use it to commit acts of violence. The challenge we face, in rich and poor countries alike, is to give people a choice and a stake in their communities – the chance to earn an honest living and provide for themselves and their children without having to turn to violence and crime.
That is why we require a fresh approach. For decades we have worked to support of economic growth and provide basic services like clean water, health and education. But I believe in countries afflicted by conflict we must now add to that core mission a commitment to build peace and to build functioning states.
First, that means supporting lasting political settlements.
Second, it means working towards sustainable peace by addressing the underlying causes of conflict and building institutions to resolve them.
Third, we must help establish effective states that can survive on their own – by supporting governments to raise tax revenues and provide basic security, justice and rule of law.
And fourth, we must help states to deliver growth, jobs and those basic services to meet the expectations and demands of their citizens.
To deliver these four objectives will require us to engage more directly and unashamedly with political institutions to deliver inclusive political settlements.
And it will also require that we support states in reforming their armed forces, police and court systems.
I need hardly suggest to an audience such as this that politics matters in all societies. But in fragile states, politics can make the difference between violence and the path to prosperity. It means giving the poor and marginalised a greater voice and greater opportunities in life. Take maternal health care, for example, where time and time again the evidence demonstrates that it is more likely to be improved where women have a greater say.
Yet in the past, aid agencies have too often been afraid to engage in building political institutions for fear of being accused of interfering in a developing country’s politics. But our experience teaches us that we cannot address the challenges we face in fragile environments, in particular, through technocratic solutions alone.
Training people to become teachers, health workers or police officers, and supplying text books and equipment are necessary interventions if we want to reduce poverty, but alone they are not sufficient.
We also need to support political institutions and processes – parliaments, political parties, civil society and the media.
We must recognise that development – at a fundamental level – is about politics… by which I mean the establishment of the right relationships across society.
Look at the success of Indonesia, where national parliamentary elections were held earlier this month. Over the last 10 years, Indonesia has developed a stable political settlement and is now, it can be argued, South East Asia’s only fully functioning democracy. Pluralist policies and decentralisation of power have helped to marginalise extremists and deliver a period of prolonged stability. Indonesia is succeeding because it’s got the politics right.
As the World Bank’s study on Voices of the Poor showed - and experience from Liberia to Afghanistan or Bosnia demonstrates - poor people want security and justice in the same way that they want sanitation, education or health care.
Without it they cannot tend their fields, collect water, send their children to school or seek to improve their incomes. Insecurity is a handbreak on development.
I recently saw this for myself in Eastern Congo, where tens of thousands of people have fled years of fierce fighting. Many are now scratching a living on a barren lava field which resembles a moonscape.
I met a woman there who fled her village with her daughter after rebels had shot dead other members of her family in front of her. As they ran they had to jump over the bodies of people who had been their neighbours.
And the desperate truth was that her story could have been repeated in only slightly different form by thousands of the refugees in those desolate camps.
One common message came through. All these people wanted was the chance to return home and live in peace. They were crying out for lasting security.
Yet, if we are honest, many who want to eliminate world poverty have been wary of working in this area:
As a concept, it became conflated and confused with the idea of ‘the war on terror’. It poses sovereignty issues for developing countries and is politically sensitive for donor countries. And where there has been a focus on security, it has largely been in terms of state control of its territory rather than thinking about security from the perspective of poor people.
And it is those people that we should be placing at the heart of our thinking on developing safer communities.
So interventions to train police officers better, to tackle abuse by soldiers, and improve access to courts need to become as commonplace a response to poverty as building schools or health clinics.
It is difficult work but it can be done. For example, in Bangladesh we have helped to deliver local justice by giving poor people access to Community Legal Services. Among other things, this has helped to resolve disputes over dowries – the major driver of poverty for millions of women and girls in Bangladesh.
Yet to achieve results on this agenda, we need to transform the way we do our business – at the international level, regionally and with donor governments.
First, we need an international system that is coherent and well organised in support of recovery in post-conflict countries. The UN has a vital role to play and its Charter gives it the international mandate to act.
We need to support the UN Peacebuilding Commission. And we await the forthcoming UN Secretary General’s report on peacebuilding in the aftermath of conflict, which will set out an agenda for collective action to guide our future work.
Secondly, we need a stronger regional response. The African Union is working to address conflict and instability on the continent. It is proving itself in the field with peacekeepers deployed with the AU mission in Somalia and the joint UN-AU mission in Darfur. The AU has provided crucial support for Kofi Annan’s mediation following the post-election violence in Kenya. And to better address future crises it is putting in place an Africa Stand-by Force, a Continental Early Warning System and a new mediation capacity.
The African Union is essential to ensuring African solutions to the challenges Africa faces, and these emerging institutions need international support.
Finally, as governments, we need to be better geared up to address the needs of fragile and conflict-affected countries. Altogether, my own department has more than doubled its spending in insecure countries over the last 5 years to over £1 billion a year. In future it will form an even greater part of our work.
We need to send some of our best people to the toughest places. Britain and America, regional and international organisations alike, need to build up a cadre of experienced staff, with the seniority and skills to work towards shared peace and state-building objectives, including greater capacity to help governments provide security and justice for ordinary people.
That is the work on which my Department is now engaged, and this summer we will publish a policy agenda setting out our new approach to working in fragile and conflict-affected states.
That publication will chart the way forward for my Department and be just the latest step we take in our efforts to tackle global poverty. It is that work which has animated our efforts since nine years ago when – in this city – 187 global leaders gathered to make a solemn pledge to the World’s Poorest People. The leaders gathered that day agreed to eight goals - on health, on education, on poverty and hunger - to help the poorest people in the world to achieve a better life by the year 2015. And since that time real progress has been made:
300 million people have been lifted out of poverty; 40 million more children are in education; the number of people on antiretroviral treatment has risen from just 100,000 in 2000 to some three million today 500 million more children have been vaccinated against killer diseases
But these gains are today under threat from economic crisis and enduring conflict. Just last month the G20 gathered in London to reaffirm their commitment to tackling poverty and getting the global economy moving. And I have just come from the Spring Meetings of the World Bank and the IMF in Washington where donor countries agreed action to try to stop that crisis becoming a calamity.
The early years of this century have shown us that only by strengthening a government’s capacity to govern and helping to build strong and effective states can we overcome the challenges faced by those countries suffering from conflict and violence.
This is our opportunity. That is our responsibility. And working together it can be our achievement.
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