§ Mr. DafisTo ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what assistance is currently being given by the Overseas Development Administration to assist the process of monitoring the state of the environment and public health in third world countries.
§ Mr. Lennox-BoydThe ODA has been involved in a number of projects which assist developing countries to monitor the state of their environment. For example, we are working in Ghana and Nigeria to establish the local environment protection council and the federal environmental protection agency respectively, to implement their national environmental protection plans. We have also undertaken studies to summarise information on the state of the environment in a number of developing countries, and have conducted country studies on global environmental issues like climate change and ozone depletion.
Our health sector assistance concentrates on strengthening the management and delivery of basic health services, to meet priority health needs. The global monitoring of public health levels in developing countries is concentrated within the World Health Organisation and other United Nations agencies, to which we arc major contributors.
We also fund the training in the United Kingdom of developing country nationals in, for example, environmental pollution control, waste management and epidemilogy.