The apparent £5.2m funding of an Ethiopian girl band doesn't exactly fill you with confidence in terms of what the Department for International Development are doing with 0.7% of GDP (about £12b), the second highest in the world.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-38364687

Whilst that funding seems high, after you look through the tabloid hyperbole, the reality is it is a whole programme designed to promote women's rights in a country that very much needs them.

http://www.upworthy.com/see-the-ethi...-of-themselves

So i'm completely failing to be outraged here. Sorry

Oh dear.

I'm sure there are many hair raisingly inept "projects" too. What is interesting is how Ms Patel, having excelled herself as Project Lie's premier harpie, and previously a supporter of scrapping the aid budget, now is a stout defender. Even of the 0.7%.

Obviously supped from the BoJo cup of bullshit.

I wasn't asking you to be outraged. Quite what the reality is who knows but the funding is under review and Patel didn't rush to defend it unlike you.

Ho,ho,ho, t. It's the way you tell'em, t! Having made grubby money helping the booze and fag boys peddle their stuff in the third world she comes home to gather some more chestnuts at Westminster. The way these people twist and turn would leave Chubby Checker looking more than a bit stiff. And the trash they showered us with about the referendum makes a pile of steaming horse manure look like another deserving recipient of UK international aid. Comedy? It would make a good pantomime, but these goons are supposed to be running the country. More like an old-fashioned Whitehall farce!

Faux outrage time.

£5.2m could do quite a lot to help carers in this country.

Priti Patel should be sacked. At a time when more and more cuts are having to be made to services that we use how can this be justified.

Ensuring our services are well funded is far more important than the girl-power, female supremacist feminist ideology. It wouldn't be so bad if it was spent on something that would actually help the girls of Ethiopia, but spending it on a commercial band is just a waste of money.

Why not build a school, set up courses for girls etc, all of which would have at least have a worthwhile lasting effect on the actual children of Ethiopia.

Value for money my arse, if she wants to fund vanity projects she should do it out of her own pocket not ours.

It would certainly help a lot more people than paying for the social media platforms of an Ethiopian band...

Foreign aid should be abolished, people in this country are struggling to get by.

So its an important educational programme that the money is being spent on fronted by 5 girls. I can think of far worse things our money is spent on to get worked up about.

Those struggling to get by in this country tend to be net beneficiaries of our tax system not net contributors.

TL;DR Version - it's not their money

We don't want to give them owt tho !

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/s...20150907101741

It isn't. The money isn't being spent on the programme, it is being spent to develop their "branded media platform". In other words we are paying for their publicity bill, our money is being used to boost their fame.

It would have been more acceptable if the money had been donated to the programme directly and the programme had chosen to use it in this way.

Its all bloody wrong - It's one thing to feed the starving,but it's quite another to pay for crap like this

There are actually a lot of studies that show aid to Africa actually hinders growth promotes coruption and holds these countries back in the long run. Why spend millions on infrastructure projects when you can wait for some Europeans or Americans to come along and build it for you free of charge.

Take a look at this graph that shows aid as percentage of GDP vs per capita growth.
https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-ap...rly.png&w=1484

A sick joke.

its the nature of soft power, you can do more to change a nation's economic and political future by supporting something new and challenging like a girl band than you can with umpteen ourses on equality and its implications for development.

its why BBC programmes , the world service , diplomacy, and educational and cultural changes are more effective in producing global changes than armies , and armies are used to recify the situation only when things go badly wrong.

We already spend far more on benefits in this country. We depend on world trade and a stable world, and a developing world - both for our economic well being, and security. Without that, the people who make the money to pay the benefits, woudln't be making the money, and we would be dodging more terrorists, and watching more markets go down to civil wars.

And the Ethiopian Spice Girls are helping us how ?

I would be interested to know how much Africa has had over the last 20 years from government aid and charities. I suspect it's a huge amount of which isn't relative to the conditions Africans live in

Girl power!

I read something recently that said this isn't the first donation to this band.

But how can Priti defend it? Not so long ago she wanted to scrap the entire department she now runs.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk...-a7137331.html

Surely she's not a braindead, two faced, shallow opportunist? I can't believe that.