Oxfam’s “From Poverty to Power”: Why a new report on U.K. aid reform is contradictory, evidence free and full of holes
In a guest post, Oxfam Research Officer Gideon Rabinowitz discusses a report released by the Henry Jackson Society that “calls for the U.K. Department for International Development (DfID) to be re-integrated into the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), for U.K. aid to increasingly promote U.K. strategic interests, and for the U.K. to apply its own definition of Official Development Assistance (ODA), breaking with the rules applied by the OECD for more than half a century.” Rabinowitz writes, “Generally, this report displays some major contradictions, a paucity of evidence to support some its of its major claims and proposals, some significant blind spots, and a self-defeating approach to reforming U.K. aid policy. Nevertheless, it’s part of a valuable conversation about how we shape a vision for Britain’s place in the world..” (2/18).