David Cameron used a recent trade visit to Nigeria to make a passionate and persuasive speech about "why Britain will keep its promises to the poorest in the world" by standing firm on increasing aid spending to 0.7% of Gross National Income by 2013. As an international development charity, WaterAid bears witness every day to the transformational impact of clean water and improved sanitation, as well as to the tragedy of where these critical services are lacking.
The UK has long played a key role when it comes to international development, with senior politicians such as Gordon Brown heralded for their leadership - for example, over UK debt cancellation in developing countries. David Cameron and Andrew Mitchell are continuing this proud tradition.
Their leadership is all the more critical at this time as a series of recent UK opinion polls (YouGov & Chatham House / YouGov & Taxpayers Alliance) seem to show a public increasingly unsure about the impact of government-funded aid and uneasy about increasing spending at a time when expenditure at home is being cut.
Public perceptions about aid are quite complex and, in many cases, based on misunderstandings. A few years back an ActionAid opinion poll showed that the public thinks the UK government spends a whopping 19% of the national budget on aid, when even including recent increases the figure is only 3%. Crucially, once told the true figure, people's views shifted dramatically - with 65% supporting calls to increase it further.
In a similar vein, the ONE Campaign recently released a short film in which people on the street were interviewed about how much we spend on aid. Again, members of the public hugely overestimated the figure and were surprised when told what the real amount was.
Another common view is that nothing has changed since the 1980s, and that things aren't getting better despite the amounts being invested, yet the evidence runs to the contrary. Notwithstanding the challenges of getting aid and development right, Joe Cerrell from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation makes clear in a recent blog, "virtually everywhere, child mortality is down and life expectancy is up".
The current famine in the Horn of Africa would seem to support the view that nothing has moved on from the Ethiopian famine in 1985, but actually a closer look reveals a subtle but important difference which shows real progress despite the tragedy.
The famine is mainly afflicting Somalia, where key causes are political stagnation and long-standing conflict. Ethiopia, which suffered so harshly in 1985, is facing the same drought as Somalia but so far famine has largely been avoided. Owen Barder from the Center for Global Development notes in a recent personal blog post that this is due to the "the safety net programme and disaster management system which has been set up by the Ethiopian government, with help from foreign aid... Investments that have been made over the past two decades have transformed Ethiopia's ability to deal with bad rains".
This confusion about spending and impact may in part be down to the fact that the public don't directly feel the impact of overseas development spending. Unlike NHS funding , where we can see the new hospital and know people who are treated there, we won't see the new water point that is transforming lives in Uganda, and probably don't even know it is there.
What does all this tell us? When people are fully informed about the relatively small proportion of the national budget that is spent on aid, and the massive impact it can have, they support it.
At WaterAid, we see day to day the huge benefits of increasing poor people's access to water and sanitation. These basic human rights also have a critical impact on health, education, livelihoods and growth. For example, young girls are 11% more likely to attend school once toilets are installed, and every £1 invested in these water and sanitation services generates an impressive £8 return in economic productivity.
Beyond these arguments, there remains an overwhelming moral imperative to act. Every single day, 4000 children die because of diseases caused by unsafe water and a lack of sanitation. That's more than the number of children dying from HIV/AIDS, malaria and measles combined.
Last year, the UK government aid programme responded to this crisis by providing over 1.5 million people with clean water and 800,000 with sanitation. That amazing achievement cost the taxpayer just 0.03% of what the government spent in total that year. That's just 30 pence out of every £1000. Who could really argue that this isn't a price worth paying?