09:30 Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)

Like the hon. Gentleman, I have had the great advantage of taking part in VSO’s parliamentarian scheme this year when I worked on a climate change project in Nigeria. I take his point about the value of VSO. Does he agree that VSO is almost the ultimate in the big society, with volunteers from across the world giving up their time for the big global society? That means that every pound spent on that organisation is such good value.

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10:22 Jo Swinson (East Dunbartonshire) (LD)

I worked alongside the International Centre for Energy, Environment and Development, which does essential work, particularly on climate change. One thing about going to other countries is that we find out things that we had no clue about before. For example, the third biggest killer in Nigeria after malaria and tuberculosis is poisoning by fumes from cooking stoves, which kills 79,000 people every year. Never in a month of Sundays would it have crossed my mind that that would be such a huge problem. One of ICEED’s projects involves improving the efficiency of cooking stoves, which obviously has a health benefit. However, it also has a massive benefit in terms of climate change and emissions. Furthermore, if stoves are more efficient, the amount of deforestation can also be reduced. In a country where most cooking is still done on a stove, that makes a big difference.

The VSO office in Abuja, where I was, had projects on education and HIV, but I was working very much on the climate change projects, as I said. For a country such as Nigeria, climate change is an absolutely vital issue. The north is already experiencing the impact of increased desertification and a reduction, therefore, in agricultural effectiveness. In the south, one just needs to look at a map to see that the former capital, Lagos, with its 38 million people, is very vulnerable to any sea level rise. For such a densely populated city, that is obviously a great concern. Furthermore, the country is blessed with massive energy reserves, but it has frequent blackouts. It also has no proper gas network, so when the oil is extracted, the gas is flared. There are therefore many challenges in tackling the important problem of climate change.

The project I was involved in worked with a network of climate change organisations that was trying to pass a Bill. The Bill is somewhat similar to our Climate Change Act 2008 and would set up a commission on climate change to provide cross-departmental expert advice to the Government. That would perhaps be done with a little more force than has been the case under the Ministry of Environment on its own. Although the Bill had been through both Houses of Parliament, the problem was that it needed to be harmonised, much like when we have ping-pong in this Parliament, and then signed off by the President. A very real deadline is approaching in April, when elections will take place. If the Bill is not signed into law by then, the whole thing will fall, and the process will have to start again from scratch.

I was giving advocacy and lobbying advice to the network of organisations involved. I ran a workshop to share some of the experience that we have had in this country of campaigning on issues such as climate change. I am pleased to report that since my visit in September, the Bill has been harmonised. The final hurdle involves getting the President to sign it off, and I hope that some of my suggestions to the youth organisations involved about a Facebook campaign—President Goodluck Jonathan is indeed on Facebook—might help to raise the issue up the agenda as the elections approach.

When I was in Nigeria, I was also able to see examples of best practice. Often, we in western countries think that we know best, and we go out and preach to people in other countries about what they should do. I was keen not to do that on my visit, so I did some research as preparation before I went and arranged to visit Cross River state, which has 60% of Nigeria’s forests. As Members will know, deforestation is a major factor in climate change.

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10:38 The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Mr Alan Duncan)

There is clear evidence that aid works. Over the past 25 years, we have seen 500 million fewer people living in poverty despite the rapid growth in the world’s population. In 2007-08, UK Aid trained more than 100,000 teachers, vaccinated 3 million children against measles and supplied just short of 7 million anti-malaria bed nets. However, we should not underestimate the scale of the challenges that we face. Some 25,000 children die every day from easily preventable and treatable diseases; and 1.4 billion people still live on less than $1.25 a day, more than two thirds of them being women and girls. Those factors, as well as new challenges such as climate change, mean that we need to maintain and strengthen our efforts.

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