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Departments: Consultants

Volume 460: debated on Monday 14 May 2007

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development what his Department’s spending was on research and consultancy services in 2006-07, broken down by programme. (133495)

In total, DFID spent £179 million on bilateral knowledge and research programmes in 2005-06. This represented 4.1 per cent. of total DFID expenditure. A summary breakdown was published in Statistics on International Development 2001/02-2005/06 and the figures are reproduced in the following table.

DFID Programme: Bilateral Technical Co-operation: Knowledge and Research, 2005-06

Sector

£000

Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries

27,143

Engineering

35,730

Health

44,915

Economic and Social

48,959

Education

7,638

Other

15,043

Total Knowledge and Research

179,428

In total, DFID spent £252 million on consultancy in 2005-06. This represented 5.7 per cent. of total DFID expenditure. A summary breakdown is shown in the following table. The majority is consultancy to deliver parts of our development programme (as published in Statistics for International Development), where the services are usually provided to third parties such as recipient governments. These are funded through programme costs. The rest is consultancy to DFID as an organisation and is funded from its administrative budget. The table excludes low value contracts issued by DFID Departments and overseas offices of which there are no consolidated records held centrally.

DFID consultancy spend, 2005-06

£000

Total consultancy funded through development programmes

225,248

Of which:

Africa Division

98,336

Asia and Pacific Division

56,830

Europe, Middle East and Americas Division

54,524

Policy Division

15,556

Consultancy for services to DFID

26,426

Total consultancy

251,673