UK aid programs, including those fighting poverty and mitigating climate change, have been affected by the dramatic decrease in the value of the pound since the 2016 Brexit referendum, Unearthed, Greenpeace's journalist team, said on Tuesday.
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 16th October, 2018) UK aid programs, including those fighting poverty and mitigating climate change, have been affected by the dramatic decrease in the value of the pound since the 2016 Brexit referendum, Unearthed, Greenpeace's journalist team, said on Tuesday.
Unearthed has revealed, having studied documents released by the UK government, that programs aimed at helping poor people living in the Congo Basin region, namely, via providing them with safe drinking water, supporting refugees in Uganda, fighting climate change and deforestation, have all been damaged by the fluctuation of the pound, which has been registered since 2016. In September, it dropped by 1.5 percent against the US Dollar and by 1.1 percent against the euro compared with the situation in May.
"Delivering aid and development programmes needs a level of predictability and Currency volatility affects predictability, long-term planning and therefore sustainability ... donors and NGOs are going to have to do some contingency planning to ensure that the currency fluctuations we are seeing post-Brexit do not have such a harmful impact on programming," Claire Godfrey, head of policy and campaigns at bond, a UK network uniting 400 international NGOs, said, as quoted by Unearthed.
Several major organizations receiving funding from the UK government's Department for International Development (DFID) confirmed to Unearthed that their projects had been affected by the pound fluctuation. While big companies can cope with the situation by finding new investors ready to pour donations in different currencies, small NGOs are more vulnerable.
"With Brexit likely to further erode both the value of the pound and reduce the UK's credentials for international cooperation, I fear that Dfid will lose the ability to leverage the most out of the aid budget and to contribute to UK soft power. This could have very real consequences for millions of people still living in poverty," David Hulme, University of Manchester's Global Development Institute executive director, told Unearthed.
The UK government is spending 0.7 percent of the UK gross national income on aid. The country is set to leave the European Union by late March 2019.
