Foreign Aid

Official development assistance from the members of the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) fell 7.1 percent in real terms in 2024, to 212 billion United States dollars (USD), the first decline after five years of growth. The OECD expects a further fall of 9 to 17 percent in 2025, the larger figure the biggest drop on record, as several of the largest donors, among them the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and France, cut their budgets. Spending on refugees inside donor countries and on Ukraine had already reduced the share that reached the poorest countries.

Six decades of evaluation give a mixed but useful record. Aid has delivered where the goal was specific and measurable: vaccination, bed nets, oral rehydration, school meals, and cash paid directly to households, which controlled trials have found is spent largely on food, livestock and schooling. Aid has delivered less where it financed budgets with no way to see results, or where the project outlived the donor’s attention. Across whole economies the link between aid and growth is weak and contested. At the level of a programme it can be measured.

Donors and recipients agreed the conditions for effectiveness in Paris in 2005 and in Busan in 2011: ownership by the country receiving the aid, a focus on results, partnerships that include civil society and business, and transparency with mutual accountability. The International Aid Transparency Initiative now publishes the spending of more than a thousand organisations in one open format, so that a programme can be followed from the budget line to the village.

Three habits make the difference in practice. Decide what the programme is meant to change before it starts, and measure that rather than the money spent. Publish the record, so that the people the programme is for can see it and say whether it reached them. Keep evaluating after the money has moved, because the programmes worth scaling and the programmes that merely ran well are not always the same ones.

Speed still matters. The ability to respond to a crisis with targeted aid, and to show afterwards what the aid did, is where transparency and results meet. The firm’s work on stakeholder ecosystems applies the same habits to aid: the people affected are the first source, the record is open, and the measure is the result.

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Sources: OECD, preliminary official development assistance figures for 2024, published April 2025; the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (2005) and the Busan Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation (2011); the International Aid Transparency Initiative; Official Development Assistance figures to 2018; From Proof of Concept to Scalable Policies.