Announcing the launch of Tuesday's long-awaited review of UK overseas aid, the international development secretary, Andrew Mitchell, promised it would all come down to value for money. The review, he said, is "taking a radically different approach to aid. We want to be judged on our results, not on how much money we are spending."
Billed as the most extensive shake-up of aid in recent history, the review is the product of the government's commitment to its £8.4bn international development budget despite wide-ranging public cuts.
So who are the main winners and losers in the review?
In terms of multilateral aid, Unicef, the Global Fund and the World Food Programme performed well against a set of measurement criteria and are likely to receive funding increases.
In contrast, organisations, including UN Habitat and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) will lose future DfID funding after they failed to prove they were delivering significant change on the ground.
The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is criticised for its patchy track record and warned that future support is contingent on better performance.
According to many in the development world, this is no great surprise. However, Oxfam has warned that as the world faces its second food crisis in three years, the government must not abandon the agency.
"It's perfectly valid to acknowledge problems with the agency," says Kathleen Spencer Chapman, head of UK government relations at Oxfam GB, "but DfID must prioritise working with them to make sure these are maintained and that withdrawal is not the easy option."
Regarding bilateral aid, Mitchell had already warned that the UK would no longer pour aid money into better off countries such as China and Russia
In the review on Tuesday, 14 more countries, including Cambodia, Vietnam, Gambia and Angola, joined them, cutting the numbers of countries receiving UK aid from 49 to 27. More controversially, the poorer Niger, Burundi and Lesotho were also on the list.
After sustained criticism, India will retain its £280m aid budget. Another major beneficiary of the streamlined aid budget is Ethiopia, which will become the UK's biggest aid recipient by 2014, making . Kenya and Rwanda will also see hikes in UK aid.
Fragile states will receive 30% of the overall UK aid budget, a total of around £3.8m by 2014. Pakistan, Nigeria, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Yemen will see the biggest percentage increase.
On BBC Radio 4's Today programme Julian Oram, head of policy at the World Development Movement, said the emphasis on fragile states was feeding concern about the direction the government is taking with the aid review.
"What we are concerned about is the focus on a smaller number of countries, which actually takes money away from some of the world's poorest countries, like Niger, Angola and Cambodia, and channels it into countries where there is deemed to be a higher security risk to the UK," he said. "The securitisation of aid is a real concern under the outcomes of this review."
Aid and anti-poverty agency ActionAid has also expressed concern, stating that UK aid must always prioritise poverty above its national security interests.
"At the moment all the signs are that the government is committed to channelling funds into the right kind of programmes, targeting poverty and essential services in these so-called fragile states, which are home to some of the most vulnerable in the world," said Dorcas Erskine, head of policy at ActionAid. "However, the proof will be in the pudding with this one and we won't know the real details until the country programmes are announced later this year. Local and civilian, and not military, players must always deliver this aid."
While ActionAid welcomed the government's specific outlining of a focus on women and girls, and an emphasis on land rights and wealth creation, Erskine said a focus on results must not dwarf more complex and less easily quantifiable work on more complex issues such as violence against women.
She also said that a focus on fragile states must not endanger money allocated to poor but more stable countries, particularly in Africa.
If the government is going to cut aid to countries like Niger and Burundi, there must be a clearly thought-out rationale behind these decisions, and the phase-out of financial support must be done in a way that does not damage the country's most vulnerable.
However, Lawrence Haddad, from the Institute of Development, who assisted DfID's multilateral aid review, said he was confident the review was focusing on the right areas.
He said that despite the emphasis on fragile states, 55% of the bilateral spending was committed to achieving the UN's millennium development goals, with targets on sanitation, health and education.
"Yes, we're spending a lot of money on Pakistan, but if it's being spent on girl's education then it's also doubling as an MDG agenda," he says. "If you look at country-by-country spending, you've got 55% on delivering the MDG targets, 20% on wealth creation, and 18% on governance and security, which I feel is striking the right balance."
Instead of an overhaul of UK aid, Haddad sees the review as an evolution rather than a revolution of what had come before.
"I think the winners of this process are those organisations who have shown they have a proven capacity to deliver real results, and the losers are those who have not recognised they have to be better at marshalling their evidence that the money will create more change," he says. "I think we have every reason to be optimistic that this review will see UK aid have a very positive global impact."
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