The British Council's contribution to international development

We have an excellent track record in delivering donor-funded development programmes.

Many of the British Council’s cultural relations activities support international development.

Facts

UK international development spending target

• The British Council’s contribution to UK official development assistance (ODA) is long-standing and has been formally recognised since the 1970s.
• As part of the spending review 2010, the British Council was asked by the UK government to play an even greater role in international development.
• We have agreed a challenging target to increase our ODA activity.

Delivering donor-funded development programmes

• In addition to our own programmes, we also deliver a range of externally funded programmes, mainly in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, on behalf of the Department for International Development (DFID), the European Union and other international donors.
• We bid competitively for donor-funded programmes, where they can contribute to our cultural relations objectives.

Cultural relations and development

• There is significant overlap between cultural relations and international development. In many of the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, our development work is the primary means by which we build trust in the UK.
• We are responding to the opportunities and challenges created by the Arab Spring through development work dealing with the underlying social and economic factors that sparked the revolution.
• Our ODA work is focused on capacity building. We work to increase educational and employment opportunities for young people; promote democracy and good governance; empower civil society; and give people a voice.
• Our programmes include the support of systemic reform in education systems, skills development, training teachers of English, linking schools and promoting creative industries for economic growth, as well as advising on democratic reform and strengthening civil society.

FACTS

In 2011-12, we were required – as part of the UK government’s commitment to Overseas Development Assistance – to spend £90.8 million of our Foreign Office grant on development in eligible countries as defined by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. We exceeded this target by £1 million. By 2015, we are required to spend 64 percent of our government grant on development work.

MENAP countries (Middle East and North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan)

In Afghanistan, we are delivering a £23 million contract for DFID and Nordic donors to strengthen selected civil society organisations and improve the Afghan government’s accountability, responsiveness and respect for human rights.

In Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, we are helping young people develop skills for employment by supporting policy development and curriculum reform, as well as building links between businesses and academic institutions.

Asia

In East Asia, we are supporting the development needs of significant partners for the UK. We will be training 26,000 English teachers in China, developing a new university based on UK models in Vietnam and training more than 11,000 English teachers in Indonesia.

We help young people find a voice in their societies. In Bangladesh this year, we celebrated the 10,000th participant in our programme to help young people deal with challenges in their communities. Alongside partners, and working with the Bangladesh parliament, we piloted the first ever Bangladesh Youth Parliament. The inaugural session was watched on television by 60 million people.

Through the ‘Teach India’ campaign, we have been teaching English to improve the career prospects of hundreds of thousands of underprivileged young people. In collaboration with corporate and non-governmental partners, we will deliver the course to one million young people.

Sub-Saharan Africa

We were awarded €430,516 by the European Union to extend our Active Citizens programme in Sudan. This will reach more than 100,000 people in 20 communities, supporting local leaders to run social cohesion projects.

We launched a US$2 million joint project with Microsoft to transform education in Sub-Saharan Africa by improving information and communications technology skills. Our close relationships with ministries of education across the region have played an important part in this project. So far, more than 60 digital hubs have been created, each serving up to nine schools. We also launched a significant partnership with Tullow Oil to support up to 110 postgraduates from Ghana and other parts of Africa to study in the UK.

English is a crucial skill for development in the region. It is a priority in our newest directorates – Rwanda, where our teaching centre achieved double the expected registrations, and South Sudan, which chose English as its official language.

We have been contracted by DFID to manage the Justice for All (J4A) programme in Nigeria. The goal of the programme is to improve personal safety and access to justice for all Nigerians by improving the capability, accountability and responsiveness of the key organisations in the safety, security and justice sector.

The British Council is the managing agent for Development Partnerships in Higher Education (DelPHE), a programme to develop global higher education partnerships in support of the Millennium Development Goals, specifically in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The programme is  funded by DFID and has an annual £3 million at its disposal. The overall goal of DelPHE is to enable higher education institutions to act as catalysts for poverty reduction and sustainable development. To date, the British Council, working with the Association of Commonwealth Universities, has facilitated the establishment of more than 120 North-South and South-South partnerships through three application rounds.

In Rwanda, the government asked us to develop English in the public sector and as the medium of instruction in schools. We are delivering training, which will teach English to 15,000 public servants over three years, and have trained nearly 100,000 English teachers.

Our Africa Knowledge Transfer Partnerships programme has established 20 partnerships between business and academia. African companies are more successful, the universities involved have more business-relevant curricula, more research and more access to graduate placements. UK universities gain access to research in emerging markets.