On 21 April, our CEO Girish Menon and our Uganda Country Director Modern Musiimenta Karema were interviewed on Sky News (one of the largest news channels in the UK) about the impact of budget cuts from the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) to our work in Uganda. They both explained that 100% of the FCDO funding for our work in Uganda had been cut with just three weeks’ notice. They also talked about the devastating implications of these cuts on our ambitions to scale the programme, including a significant reduction of costs and some staff redundancies.
Girish said, “It is a bit ironic that on one hand, we talk about the UK Government’s priority for funding education, building back better and supporting countries and economies particularly in the developing world; but on the other hand, education programmes are being cut. This is a case of balancing the books on the backs of the poor and marginalised.”
On 28 April, Girish also had an article published by Huffington Post to discuss these budget cuts. It talks about how, in response to the global pandemic, international aid contributions from the thirty member states of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee has gone up by 7% in absolute terms compared to 2019, but unfortunately UK was not one of them. Cuts to the FCDO have fallen sharply on some of the poorest countries, especially in Africa, and some of the worst affected by conflict: Yemen, Syria, Somalia and South Sudan.
Girish says, “In a pandemic-ravaged world, we need visionary leadership. This is absolutely the wrong time for Britain to choose to recede from its leadership role.”
To read the full article, click here.