Thank you, Kirsty, and thank you, convener, for giving us this chance to give our evidence to you.
As you mentioned, I am here with my colleagues Ian Nicol and John Mooney. Ian covers the Malawi fund, but he has also been very involved in the set-up of the small grants programme. John, who is our Rwanda programme manager, has been very involved in the set-up of the humanitarian emergencies fund. If the committee has questions on those aspects of our operations, we would be happy to take those as well.
I know that the committee has already taken evidence on our new international development strategy, but I would like briefly to put today’s session in that context, too. We see that as important to the work of the Scottish Government, and we think that Scotland has a distinctive contribution to make. We feel that that is true around the expertise that we can share, so we try to align our grants and our programme management behind supporting that and being innovative in what we do. We know that, in comparison with many international funders, our budget lines and our capacity are limited, but we try to be innovative and different and to achieve impact through that.
Our emphasis is on partnership, both with the organisations that we work with and with Governments and others in our beneficiary countries, and all our subject matter priorities for our funding are determined by the appetite and interests of those partner Governments. We look for impact, obviously, in those beneficiary countries but we also hope for some impact here in Scotland. The international development fund is part of the Scottish Government’s attempt to develop Scotland as a good, global citizen, so—as Kirsty Norris outlined with the small grants fund—we see part of our purpose there as building capacity within Scotland to engage in international development and to have that impact on the broader stage. We are proud that some of the small grants beneficiaries have gone on to secure more funding not only from us but from other donors, such as the Department for International Development or even the big international donors, which shows that Scottish organisations are able to play that role on a global stage.
We see the programme as an important part of Scotland’s contribution to the sustainable development goals. The First Minister has committed to that and, again, partnership plays a very important role.
The budget is small. It has increased consistently over the years, but it remains small by many other comparators, so it is very important that we manage it appropriately to maximise its impact. We hope that our impact is not necessarily determined entirely by the size of the budget. When international comparators are looked at, some of the countries that come out on top in those rankings, including the Nordic countries, are often not those with the largest amount of money to spend.
We think that it is important that our grant management processes are rigorous, as they should be. This is public money and we have to meet high standards of public accountability, proportional to the size of the organisations that we are working with and to the size of the fund we are operating; effective and appropriate controls have to be in place. To do that, we comply with the Scottish Government’s internal audit proceedings. We have been reviewed and we have met the recommendations of those reports. We are open to lesson learning, and I hope that during today’s evidence session we will demonstrate that we are interested in continuously improving the way in which we manage the money.
As I said at the beginning, this is a big year for us—it is the first year of the new strategy, which means that we have been quite busy on the grant management front. Our Rwanda and Zambia projects started just in October. The grant process was run over the summer; I think that it was running when the committee last looked at this area. Our small grants bidding process has just finished—Kirsty Norris can tell you more about that—and our Malawi round is currently open. This has also been the first year of the humanitarian emergencies fund, which has been activated three times—once for the East African famine, once for the south Asia flooding crisis and once for the Rohingya crisis in Burma.
We have learned lessons from the process for the Rwanda and Zambia fund, but we are interested in any more feedback that the committee might have. I can reassure you that all of our administration costs—apart from the humanitarian emergencies fund, of which a small percentage is for administration—including the costs for the Corra Foundation contract, are met from a separate budget line. They do not come from our headline development funding.
I will leave it there. We are happy to take questions.