Another door slams shut for the disrupted generation

When Lou Avey returned from a placement in rural Cambodia, she felt empowered.

She had just spent three months living and working with young people from the southeast Asian country, overcoming linguistic and cultural barriers to carry out education and community projects.

The experience provided by the International Citizen Service (ICS) was invaluable for Lou, who was brought up by her sister on a council estate in Blackley, north Manchester, which was identified by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation as one of the parliamentary constituencies with the highest poverty risk score in the UK.

After returning home in 2019, the 23-year-old moved to Poland to teach English, plans that were curtailed by the coronavirus pandemic.

Determined to keep effecting change, Lou volunteered with a charity to help people from the LGBTQ+ community who felt isolated during the pandemic.

These experiences inspired Lou, who is pansexual, to set up a global platform called Sisterhood to magnify the voices of queer, non-binary and trans women.

More than 6,000 miles away, Abel Odeke, 26, is busy working as the managing director of Equal Aqua Uganda, an organisation tackling water inequality in rural and low-income communities.

He co-founded the project in 2020 with friends from the UK and Uganda who met each other as ICS volunteers and saw first-hand the challenges that some Ugandans faced in accessing clean water and sanitation.

The UK government scheme funded and organised volunteer placements for 18 to 25-year-olds and brought together young people from across the world.

Since it was founded by David Cameron in 2011, ICS has brought together more than 40,000 young people from the UK and overseas on programmes to alleviate poverty and forge sustainable development across 32 different countries. It has been cut back repeatedly over the years and by the start of the pandemic placements were being offered in only seven countries.

Many of the UK volunteers came from diverse and disadvantaged backgrounds. Some had never owned a passport before being accepted onto the programme.

But like many opportunities for young people in recent years, this door has slammed shut. The contract for ICS ended in February and amid wider cuts to the foreign aid budget the government has not made any promises to restart the programme. 

This did not escape the attention of MPs, who demanded answers from the government in a private notice question on March 16, 2021; answers that Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park, a minister in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), could not provide.

It is not just ICS that faces an uncertain future, but VSO and UK foreign aid more generally.

The government announced in November that it was cutting its aid spending from 0.7% of the national budget to 0.5%, citing the pressures of the pandemic.

A commitment to set aside 0.7% for aid had been enshrined in law by the 2015 International Development Act.

Critics say that the government has not been clear about when or where these cuts will take place, with the Labour MP Sarah Champion, chairwoman of the international development committee, lamenting that it was an “understatement” to say that a government update on April 22 was “scant on detail”.

Not all onlookers may be so concerned, with some previously criticising international aid as a continuation of colonialism that harms more than it helps.

ICS itself was not without controversy. In 2012 the scheme was described as “high risk” by the National Audit Office after two volunteers drowned and others were sexually assaulted.

The same year, it was criticised in The Daily Telegraph for providing “gap-year holidays that reveal the madness of overseas aid”.

But for Gary Forster, chief executive of the aid watchdog Publish What You Fund, the government’s lack of transparency about aid cuts is concerning for all observers: “Whether you’re pro or anti-aid, no one thinks that these decisions should be going on behind closed doors.”

He added: “You literally have NGOs scrabbling around in data systems to try and figure out if the government has changed its publication of data and if so what that could mean for the country where they’re working.”

The FCDO did not respond to a request for comment.