It has been a year of aid cuts – major reductions in development funding from the US, Germany, France, and the UK mark the biggest contraction in aid spending in decades. By some projections, aid spending by the top donors in the world will decline by $67 billion (£50bn) from 2023 to 2026, a drop of almost a third.
This is driven primarily by Donald Trump's administration shuttering the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and cancelling 80 per cent of its foreign aid programmes. Its sudden and chaotic decision to cut USAID has been coupled with an increasingly uninterested, if not adversarial, approach to multilateral cooperation in general – skipping G20 meetings and calling the language of the Sustainable Development Goals (the global, UN-set targets for addressing poverty) "adverse" to American interests.
