International development aid fell 25% in 2025
Global development aid plunged by a record 23.1% in real terms last year, the OECD said, describing the drop as a historic setback driven largely by a sharp pullback in US support amid mounting budget pressures and geopolitical...
Global development aid plunged by a record 23.1% in real terms last year, the OECD said, describing the drop as a historic setback driven largely by a sharp pullback in US support amid mounting budget pressures and geopolitical strain.
Preliminary figures from the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development showed that official development assistance (ODA) from members of its Development Assistance Committee totaled $174.3 billion last year, marking a second straight annual decline.
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“This is the largest annual contraction recorded in the history of ODA,” the OECD said, adding that the total amounted to just 0.26 percent of the combined gross national income of contributing countries.
The organisation said 26 of its 34 members cut their ODA contributions, with the five biggest donors — France, Germany, Japan, Britain and the United States — responsible for 95.7% of the overall decline recorded last year.
Germany’s aid spending fell 17.4%, but the depth of the US reduction was so significant that Germany still emerged as the world’s largest ODA provider for the first time.
Anti-poverty group Oxfam denounced the reductions, pointing to the central role aid plays in fighting diseases including HIV-AIDS and malaria.
“Wealthy governments are turning their backs on the lives of millions of women, men and children in the Global South with these severe aid cuts,” Oxfam’s development finance lead Didier Jacobs said.
Jacobs said the Institute of Global Health of Barcelona had estimated that aid cuts on this scale would lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
“If this trend continues, aid cuts could kill over nine million people by 2030,” Mr Jacobs said.
He called on governments to rebuild their aid budgets and reinforce a global humanitarian system that he said is confronting “its most serious crisis in decades”.
“There are other ways to find tens of billions of dollars, such as by taxing the $2.84 trillions of dollars that the super-rich hide in tax havens,” he said.