Britain to cut aid to world's poorest countries

[alp227]

Source: The Guardian

Britain is to stop sending direct aid to Burundi and Niger, two of the world's poorest countries, the government announced as it unveiled plans to rebalance the £8.4bn international development budget.

The two African nations, which are ranked second and fourth respectively in a World Bank list of the world's poorest states, are among 16 countries that will no longer receive bilateral aid from Britain by 2016. Direct aid will also be halted to Lesotho which is ranked 28th on the World Bank list.

Burundi, a landlocked country in the unstable Great Lakes region of Africa, is still suffering from the consequences of the Hutu-Tutsi massacres in the 1990s when 200,000 of its citizens died. Niger, a landlocked country in west Africa, depends on foreign aid for half of the government's budget.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2011/mar/01/uk-cuts-aid-poorest-countries

[IcyPeas]

1. I read something different here:

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/22/20110301/tuk-uk-britain-aid-fa6b408.html

snip:
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The government will phase out aid programmes by 2016 to 16 countries considered no longer to need it, including China, Russia, Vietnam, Moldova, Cameroon, Kosovo, Iraq and Serbia.

Aid will in future be focussed on 27 poor, conflict-ridden or "fragile" states, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, India, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and Zimbabwe.
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more:
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It will stop funding UN HABITAT, which promotes sustainable urban development, the International Labour Organisation and the U.N. International Strategy for Disaster Reduction. All four agencies were judged to be poor performers.

Britain will increase funding to nine organisations, which it says provide good value, including children's fund UNICEF, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
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