More Foreign Aid Bollocks

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/272450/How-Britain-is-giving-355m-to-educate-the-girls-of-Asia-and-Africa




NICK Clegg triggered fresh outrage at Britain’s spiralling overseas aid budget by pledging £355million of taxpayers’ cash to educate girls in poor countries.


He announced the huge handout at the Lib Dem conference yesterday amid warnings of swingeing austerity for ­families at home.

The Deputy Prime Minister’s promise of cash for countries including South Sudan, Nigeria and Bangladesh also came as it emerged that a literacy drive in British schools is to be axed.

Nick Clegg was cheered by his party’s grassroots activists at their gathering in Birmingham yesterday.

But the move infuriated opponents of the Coalition’s policy of raising overseas aid to a massive £12.6billion a year by 2015 – equivalent to nearly £500 for every household in Britain.

Tory MP Philip Davies said: “This is totally unjustifiable. However nice these projects sound, they are simply unaffordable.


Nick Clegg announced the huge handout at the Lib Dem conference yesterday amid warnings of swingeing austerity for ­families at home



“What Nick Clegg should be focused on is raising educational standards in this country. He should look at the number of people who leave schools and cannot read or write.”

MEP Paul Nuttall, education spokesman for the UK Independence Party, said: “This is deeply unfair on the British taxpayers, who expect their taxes to be used to educate children in this country. Who does he represent?”

Mr Clegg announced the policy at a question-and-answer session, when a delegate asked what the Coalition was doing to increase aid spending.

“It is something I feel passionate about myself, having worked before I went into Parliament on development aid,” he replied. He said the ­policy was in the country’s “self interest” and that poverty in the Third World was “the breeding ground for terrorism, strife, mass movement of people”.


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Thanks to his pledge, £355million will be donated to the new Girls Education Challenge project by 2015 – enough to provide a million youngsters with secondary education for three years.

But the National Association of Head Teachers yesterday said Britain’s Reading Recovery Project was being dropped at many of the country’s schools.

Andrew Mitchell, Tory International Development Secretary, said: “Educating girls tackles the root causes of poverty. Research shows that providing girls with an extra year of schooling can increase their wages by up to 20 per cent, while also lowering birth rates.”

Officials say girls in developing countries who have been through secondary education are less likely to marry in adolescence, will have fewer children and will avoid becoming HIV positive.