This week we have the opportunity to focus aid discussions on what really matters: quality not quantity.

A UK taxpayer earning £30,000 per year will pay £7,065 in tax. Of that, £67 will go to the aid budget and £403 towards defence. That leaves £6,595 for everything else. A proper debate about government spending should surely recognise that pitching defence spending against aid is like robbing a pretty hard-up Peter to pay an even more impoverished Paul.

Today I met a future doctor, accountant and engineer. They were all 13 year old girls. The aspirations of these Ethiopian girls is heartening. The engineer says she wants to train to help "build up her country". I wouldn't bet against her doing just that.

Mobile money means more small, safe, cashless transactions can happen - urban workers can send money back to rural homes; small shops and stalls can trade more and grow their business.

This week Comic Relief celebrated its 25th anniversary and as we look back over the years, there is a lot to be proud of. For the past quarter of a century, Comic Relief has inspired people up and down the country to play a part in changing the lives of millions of people across Africa for the better.

The United Kingdom should divert one third of its £8bn foreign aid to the military and scrap the department of international development, a think-tan...

An old saying goes that if you owe a bank ten thousand pounds then the bank owns you; if you owe ten million, then you own the bank. The opposite is the case with foreign aid.

Our Olympic and Paralympic heroes deserved every bit of the great parade we saw last week. But why didn't this celebration happen again yesterday? That's when the UN announced that the number of children dying each year under the age of five has fallen by 41% since 1990. While 12 million died in 1990, just under seven million lives were lost in 2011. That's 14,000 a day less than were dying in 1990. The progress made in reducing child deaths must be one of the biggest success stories of the last decade. Yet there was no tickertape parade.

If people are not prepared to take a stand against this, we really are living in a hopeless world.

Conservative minister and self-confessed "grammar fascist" Alan Duncan has ramped up his semantic campaign with a memo banning civil servants from usi...

David Ojok was walking home from school when the gunmen came for him. He was just 13 and was taken prisoner before being inducted into Ugandan rebel group the Lord's Resistance Army. Led by self-proclaimed messiah Joseph Kony, the rebel group inflicted unimaginable suffering during two decades of violence in Africa's longest running civil conflict. David, now 18, was one of 60,000 children abducted by the LRA - trapped in a terrifying limbo - in fear for his life with little hope of a future free from violence. Summoning incredible bravery, the teenager escaped his captors and is now looking ahead to a brighter future as a brick layer with training supported by British aid.

Rwanda, which suffered a brutal genocide in 1994, is the only Sub-Saharan African country on track with its Millennium Development Goal to halve the proportion of people lacking in water and sanitation services by 2015.

Aid to fragile but corrupt countries should be conditional, a committee of MPs has said, amid concerns that taxpayers' money is being used to prop-up ...

The rapid expansion of Britain's international aid programme has left it increasingly exposed to corruption and fraud, the new independent watchd...