Budget Aid to be used by the Department of International Trade

The Department of International Trade will receive a portion of the official aid budget of £ 14 billion.

The funds will be used to help developing countries leverage the UK's expertise in trade agreements and attract foreign investment.

This decision will see Liam Fox's departmental spending on official development badistance.

The funds will continue to be used to achieve the government's goal of spending 0.7% of national income on foreign aid.

The measure was confirmed by Trade Secretary Liam Fox in an interview with BBC News.

"We want to bring development and trade closer together," he said.

"Rather than letting developing countries depend on the generosity of rich countries, we want them to be able to achieve sustainable development and get out of poverty through trade, and to help them. one way to do that is to give them the skills to attract investment to their country (…) to develop some of these attributes that have allowed us to get investment in the UK and help them to obtain investments on a stable basis. "

• Move foreign aid "away from humans"

Unlocking the current distribution of aid spending outside the primary responsibility of the Department of International Development is already controversial.

More than a quarter of the budget is now spent by departments such as the Ministry of Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, the Ministry of the Interior, the Department of Business, the Department of Health and the Tax and Customs Service, against ten times less than five years ago.

Last month, a report from the National Bureau of Control concluded: "Expanding ODA expenditures to other departments has increased the risks of efficiency, and it's not enough. unclear whether the expected benefits of broader skills training have been realized. "

Development charities have also criticized the eventuality of a conflict of interest by linking aid spending on global poverty to the UK's trade agenda after Brexit. .

Last year, the House of Commons' International Development Committee criticized existing programs proposing a "dual purpose": "to be used as a slush fund to fund the development of diplomatic, commercial or national security interests from the United Kingdom".

He criticized the Foreign Office's Prosperity Fund for allocating aid to projects aimed at developing the Chinese film industry, libraries and bond markets, and warned against measures "towards the return of tied aid ".

In 2001, the Labor government banned the Labor government from channeling aid money into projects that were also intended to benefit British businesses.

Liam Fox told the BBC: "There is no tied aid in the sense that it benefits the UK, it has to benefit the country itself, we know why countries are investing in United Kingdom – these reasons also apply to other countries.

"You have to remember that trade, free trade is the way we have pulled one billion people out of abject poverty into a generation on a global scale, one of the greatest achievements of our world. We need to make sure that continues. "

Countries targeted for this form of aid financing include Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia, Colombia, Peru, Indonesia and Bangladesh, according to the International Trade Department.

Many of these countries are not in the "least developed countries" category, but they are potential candidates for post-Brexit free trade agreements.