On current trends, global overseas development assistance will likely decline by 25 per cent over the next two years relative to 2023 levels.
On current trends, global overseas development assistance will likely decline by 25 per cent over the next two years relative to 2023 levels.
While still only March, it’s already been a tough year for international development.
Ideological and budgetary pressures have led to several major donors substantially cutting – or in the US case dismantling – their aid programs.
First and foremost, this is a calamity for the world’s most vulnerable, with the costs already being counted in lives and increased suffering. But it also calls into question the continuance of the international development system itself.
According to calculations by former senior DFAT and AusAID official Robin Davies, on current trends global overseas development assistance (ODA) will likely decline by 25 per cent over the next two years relative to 2023 levels.
That’s his “best-case scenario”; on less sanguine assumptions the decline could be more like a third or half within a matter of years. “When that much of a thing goes missing,” Davies warns, “it’s clearly at risk of collapse”.
For the Donald Trumps and Elon Musks of the world, whose flagrant animosity towards aid is plain to see, this would likely be cause for celebration, or at the very least met with indifference.
But what would things actually look like if foreign aid disappeared? Until this year the answer would’ve been academic; it’s now an uncomfortably live question.
One way to get a sense is to invert aid’s historical accomplishments. By some estimates almost 670 million people would’ve otherwise died between 1990 and 2016 if not for global health aid, including more than 150 million people from immunisable diseases.
At least 2.1 billion cases of malaria would not have been prevented, leading to an additional 11.7 million deaths.
Without US funding for Aids prevention and treatment, a further 26 million people would have died of the disease since 2003, and eight million more babies would’ve been born with HIV.
A large proportion of the more than one billion people lifted out of extreme poverty since 1990 would remain destitute.
Health is one of the clearest illustrations on why foreign aid is so vital. In recent years we’ve seen the devastation that a global pandemic can wreak.
Now imagine a future outbreak in a scenario where the ODA-funded monitoring, prevention, preparedness, and response capacity of developing countries – as well as the ODA-funded multilateral coordination mechanisms – no longer exist.
If the disease had sufficiently high transmissibility and mortality rates, the consequences would be globally catastrophic.
For those unconvinced of the value of development assistance, a 2020 study found that responding to Covid-19 cost 500 times more than the types of preventative measures funded by foreign aid would have been.
Global health aid isn’t charity, its self-interest. In the words of UN Secretary-General António Guterres: “we are only as strong as the weakest health system in our interconnected world.”
It’s not just human security that’s at stake. Development assistance plays a critical role in helping build and support the institutional capacity and societal resilience of fragile states.
While imperfect, without this support corruption and inequality are exacerbated, increasing the likelihood of conflict, violence and potentially state collapse. This instability can metastasise across borders, and it can cost up to 100 times more to respond to conflict than to prevent it.
Through this prism aid isn’t philanthropy, it’s preventative national security.
In that sense, the UK’s decision to explicitly redirect money from development to defence is not only a patently false economy, its counterproductive.
This isn’t to argue against defence spending – which it’s clear European countries do need to bolster – but to do so at the expense of development today just means the cost of dealing with the security challenges of tomorrow will be higher.
The Western aid model clearly has its flaws, and some see its breakdown as a “wakeup call” – an opportunity to reimagine alternative development approaches.
But given the overt hostility to the very concept of development assistance – Trump’s executive order is clear when it says “the United States foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values” – the prospect of a more equitable development ecosystem arising, phoenix-like, from the present chaos seems exceedingly unlikely.
That’s not to say reimagining foreign aid isn’t a worthwhile aim, but in the current context the priority must be to ensure the whole edifice doesn’t irreparably crumble. If it does everyone will be worse off.
Tom Barber is program manager at the Asia-Pacific Development, Diplomacy and Defence Dialogue (AP4D)
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