PREVIEW
The OECD is warning that assistance to poorest nations must be protected to avoid ‘dramatic’ impacts
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) says that aid to struggling sub-Saharan African countries should be ringfenced amid the deep spending cuts threatened by the United States and many European donors.
Aid fell by 7.1% in 2024, but the OECD expects it to drop by another 17% in 2025, as the USAID cuts bite. By 2030, aid spending could be 30% lower than it was in 2023. Net Official Development Assistance to sub-Saharan Africa dropped by 2% to US$36 billion, while aid to the group of least developed countries (LDCs) was $35bn, a fall of 3% in real terms.
The 2025 cuts would be the largest since it started recording aid spending, OECD officials told journalists on Wednesday 16 April. Karsten Staur, who chairs the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee, called for aid to the world’s 26 poorest countries, of which 23 are in sub-Saharan Africa, to be ‘ringfenced’ by donors.
He pointed out that in these countries development aid accounts for more than 60% of their external financing and that it is fanciful to expect that the private sector will plug the gap. ‘If ODA was stopped it would have an extremely dramatic, cataclysmic effect,’ he warned.
African states are already counting the cost of the three-month suspension to most USAID programs, and the shuttering of the agency itself, by US President Donald Trump (Dispatches, 28/1/25, Rubio deals hammer blow to US aid). Healthcare and education budgets are set to be the worst affected. Trump has exempted emergency humanitarian aid from the suspension.
However, the US cuts will be compounded by moves by Europe’s major donors, Germany, the United Kingdom and France, to slash their own development spending (AC Vol 66 No 5, Western aid cuts reshape the geopolitical landscape). All three have announced plans to cut aid budgets by over 30% by 2029.
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