A homeless street child wears a shirt as another sleeps on a pavement in Kolkata, India. Credit: Bikas Das/AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved. In May 1997, a new Labour Government was elected in the UK. One of its first ‘machinery of government’ changes was to create a new Department for International Development (DFID), headed by then Secretary of State for International Development – Clare Short – who would be in the Cabinet. It was also decided to write a White Paper on International Development, which was published in November of that year: ‘Eliminating World Poverty: A Challenge for the 21st Century’.
The focus of paper, in which I was closely involved, was a new paradigm for international development, determined no longer by the politics of the Cold War but by a desire to see development benefit the poorest people in the poorest countries. This new framework for development – the International Development Targets (which were a few years later to be transformed into the Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs) – had as their overarching goal the halving of absolute poverty by 2015, with a number of supporting targets focusing on primary education and primary health.
