Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s and the British Council’s use of aid in response to the Arab Spring

Our approach

For this review, we examined expenditure by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and the British Council through their official development assistance (ODA) programmes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in the period since the Arab Spring, with a particular focus on Arab Partnership Participation Fund (APPF). This focus enabled us to assess the capacity of both organisations to redirect their ODA expenditure to meet a major new strategic challenge. We commissioned a literature review on the causes and consequences of the Arab Spring to underpin our work.

We reviewed the APPF in detail. At the central level, we assessed its strategy, governance arrangements and business processes, looking briefly at other FCO strategic programmes (the Human Rights and Democracy Fund and the Prosperity Fund) as comparators. We conducted a portfolio review of APPF programming across MENA to analyse spending patterns.

We carried out two country visits, to Tunisia and Egypt. There, we reviewed the full portfolio of APPF activities, examining project documents, interviewing FCO staff and, in the majority of cases, meeting with the implementing partners. We spoke with a range of national stakeholders, including CSOs, government institutions, parliamentarians and journalists. We noted that, for APPF programmes, the intended beneficiaries were often the public at large. As most of the assistance is not visible to the general public, we collected feedback from those with a direct knowledge of the support. Due to security conditions in Egypt at the time of our visit, we were unable to visit projects outside Cairo.

Review questions

1. Objectives: What is the programme trying to achieve?
2. Delivery: Is the delivery chain designed and managed so as to be fit for purpose?
3. Impact: What is the impact on intended beneficiaries?
4. Learning: What works best and what needs improvement?