Aid organisations fear for projects

Opposition MPs and aid organisations hope they can persuade the Government not to axe funding for programmes they say are helping people in poor countries.

Foreign Minister Murray McCully has written to the Council for International Development, which allocates $26 million of government funding for charities doing overseas development work, saying programmes are out of step with the Government's goal of driving economic growth in the Pacific.

Council executive director David Culverhouse said it was difficult to plan ahead and non-government organisations which raised $145 million in their own right didn't know whether they would continue to receive government funding.

The executive chairman of Unions Aotearoa International Development Trust, Ross Wilson, said Mr McCully had said there were too many programmes focused on trade union rights in obscure parts of the world.

"I can only assume the minister is referring to our project partnerships with Burmese migrant workers on the Thai-Burma border and with Dalit (untouchable) workers in South India," Mr Wilson said.

"I hope a discussion with the minister will persuade him of the huge benefit our projects bring to some of the most vulnerable groups of people in our region."

The national president of the New Zealand branch of the United Nations Development Fund for Women, Rae Julian, said the situation was tragic because aid organisations often needed to focus on social development in order to progress economic development.

"If children do not get to school, if families have major health or disability concerns, if the women are regularly beaten by their husbands, if communities are divided into violence factions then economic development is not their immediate priority."

Labour MP Phil Twyford said he was worried that aid programmes would suffer "simply because they don't meet Mr McCully's narrow political agenda".

The Greens' Kennedy Graham said Mr McCully seemed unable to discern the respective merits of sustainable development from material economic growth.

"The minister's personal antipathy to some aspects of the work done by NGOs (non-government organisations) seems to be driving the current aid overhaul," he said.

"This promises disaster for the aid effort in the Pacific."