Dutch aid agency to help poor at home

One of the largest overseas aid agencies in the Netherlands is to begin working against poverty at home for the first time ever – as a result of the economic impact of austerity cuts on the unemployed and socially isolated.

Since it was founded in 1999, Cordaid – the Catholic Organisation for Relief and Development Aid – has become one of the most influential Dutch players in overseas development, working in 36 countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, with an annual budget of more than €170 million.

Creeping poverty
Now the agency says it will use the experience gained in countries such as Afghanistan and the Congo to begin its first anti-poverty campaign at home – where it says the number of people trapped below the poverty line has been creeping up as the economy has declined.

“This is not a new problem, though it has certainly worsened since the economic crisis, but over the past 20 years the number of people living in poverty in the Netherlands has more than doubled from four per cent to 10 per cent of the population”, said the agency’s spokeswoman, Kristal Ashra.

“As an international organisation whose mission is to fight poverty, we cannot shut our eyes to what is happening in our own back yard. We must respond,” she added, in comments regarded as an embarrassment to prime minister Mark Rutte’s centre-left Liberal-Labour Party coalition.

Mr Rutte's first coalition with the Christian Democrats, supported from the sidelines by right-wing leader Geert Wilders, collapsed early last year in a row over how to find €13 billion in cuts to keep the country's budget deficit inside the EU requirement of 3 per cent of GDP.

More cuts
That target was achieved when Mr Rutte formed a new government with Labour last October. But that coalition now faces the prospect of finding another round of cuts totalling €6 billion for 2014 – despite growing internal dissent and deepening unpopularity with the public.

Cordaid revealed that one its first homegrown anti-poverty campaigns will be in The Hague, seat of the Dutch government.

It says it will begin with a new “social entrepreneurship” fund to support small enterprises started by entrepreneurs using their unemployment benefit.

Cordaid, however, has its own financial problems. It cut its workforce by 100 last year, and its current state subvention of €65 million a year faces being cut back to just €25 million by 2015.