The Shingani district in central Mogadishu, Somalia, in ruins after years of conflict. Picture: Martin Adler/Panos
Stable, well run countries lie at the heart of prosperity and real progress. Preventing conflict and building effective and legitimate institutions that can deliver services including education, health or justice, is crucial to reducing poverty.
Good governance is not just about government. It is also about parliament, the judiciary, the media, political parties, and civil society. It is about how citizens, leaders and public institutions relate to each other in order to make change happen.
Elections and democracy are an important part of the equation, but equally important is the way government goes about the business of governing. Unless governance improves, poor people will continue to suffer from a lack of security, public services and economic opportunity.
In 2009-10, we undertook a review of our governance portfolio and the impact of spending at country and global levels in governance related programmes. This looked at our engagement in this area over the five-year period 2004 to 2009.
The purpose of the review was to assess the results of our expenditure in governance, and how we could better allocate resources to further improve value for money in the future. The findings are already being used to support our renewed focus on achieving and demonstrating the results and value for money of UK development assistance for governance.
More than 1.5 billion people live in fragile or conflict-affected states or in countries with very high levels of criminal violence. Conflict deprives millions of people of their basic rights to life and security.
Conflict and violence also have a particularly negative impact on women, children and young people. Without security and access to justice, a country’s economy and public services cannot function and peace is unlikely to be sustainable.
We are scaling up our work in fragile and conflict-affected states: 21 out of 28 of our focus countries are fragile or conflict-affected and the UK Government has committed to spend 30% of Official Development Assistance in these environments. To make countries safer and fairer, we will:
- Focus 30% of our aid on war torn and unstable countries by 2014
- Support freer and fairer elections in 13 countries with more than 300 million voters
- Help ten million women to access justice through the courts, police and legal assistance
- Support 40 million people to hold authorities to account