Steve McCabe – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for International Development

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Steve McCabe on 2016-06-08.

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what steps she is taking to ensure that UK aid for the conflict in Yemen benefits its intended recipients; and what proportion of the £85 million of aid for Yemen committed in the last year has been used to support children.

Sir Desmond Swayne

The UK is the 4th largest donor to the crisis in Yemen and has more than doubled its humanitarian support over the last year to £85 million for 2015/16. We work with trusted and impartial partners such as UN agencies and NGOs who have good access and a strong track record of delivering and monitoring assistance in difficult and dangerous places. We regularly monitor and review our programmes and have an independent monitoring programme to provide independent assurance on what we are delivering.

In 2015/16 DFID provided the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) with £6 million, United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) with over £21 million and Save the Children with over £3 million. Amongst other activities, our funding helped treat over 150,000 children under 5 with severe acute malnutrition and screen 140,000 children for childhood infections. It also helped support and refer displaced children and enabled 3,500 refugee children and Yemeni children from their host communities to resume education. DFID has also supported education in Yemen through the Social Fund for Development (SFD). Since 2010, more than 240,000 children have attended schools supported by SFD.