Aid: whatever became of compassion?

Rainer Zitelmann’sAid and poverty; why the agencies fail (TheArticle, 13 January 2026) was a sign of the times.  It drew a remarkable 90 per cent approval in readers’ comments.  The days passed.  No rebuttal was forthcoming.   Yet, its conclusions were wrong in so many ways: not least morally, or as an effective economic policy, or for promotion of “soft power”.  Or indeed factually: development workers do not earn big salaries and aid does not only sustain corrupt elites.   The causes of poverty are complex.  Development aid is complex as a result.

Thilo Bode, the prominent German NGO campaigner, was presented as an authoritative voice on NGO aid projects and Official Development Assistance, ODA.  But knowledgeable no doubt about saving whales and consumer rights, after two stints as a CEO at Greenpeace and Foodwatch, both worthy causes, Bode is hardly a go-to expert on development aid.

Bode’s more youthful experience of development projects in Mali and Burkina Faso, today under military rule, and Somalia, also blighted by jihadist terrorism, should not suggest, even to an aid sceptic, a wide understanding of the limits on NGOs’ effectiveness in Africa, let alone globally.   Morocco and Tunisia, also listed as examples of failure, have achieved significant poverty reduction.

And haven’t recent events made such judgements on aid effectively redundant?   Last year, Elon Musk froze some $58 billion in ODA (Official Development Assistance) allocated for 2025 by the United States: in other words, aid for poverty alleviation, emergency humanitarian interventions, conflict prevention, peacebuilding,  global public goods such as health care and vaccination, or climate action.  Out of a total payroll of 10,000, 1,200 USAID staff were fired and 4,200 put on “administrative leave”.  Meanwhile substantial buildings occupied by USAID were handed over to another agency: Customs and Border Protection.

In the UK, Sir Keir Starmer’s decision to reduce the ODA budget, between 2025-2027/8, from 0.5% to 0.3% of UK Gross National Income (GNI), came after a reduction from 0.7% to 0.5% made by  Conservative governments.  Some 25% of this diminishing budget is still being spent on accommodating refugees in the UK. In 2027/2028, Defense will be extracting £6.5 billion from today’s £14 billion aid budget, not including funding for Ukraine.

The need for increased defence spending is itself a knock-on from the policies of the Trump administration.  The British Government’s mantra — “this is a difficult decision” — neglects mentioning the choice of alternative difficult decisions, such as wealth taxes — which come with greater political costs.  GNI percentage cuts, but less severe, have also been made in Germany, Europe’s other major donor, from its much higher peak of £28.5 billion in 2022.

Global aid flows, currently between $170-180 billion, rose between 2019-2023, then dropped by 9% in 2024 and are currently falling at somewhere between 9-17%.  The UN Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) calculate 239 million people currently require humanitarian aid.  Between 2016-2019 UNOCHA reached some 130 million, but has recently been obliged to adopt a prioritisation programme for the very poorest, serving only 87 million, though hoping to return to 130 million in the future.  OXFAM’s statistic has more emotional  impact : “a child under five could die every forty seconds by 2030”, due solely to the US aid cuts.

The justification for US aid cuts is allegedly to reduce national debt.  Trump’s acolytes complained about what they called “woke” projects funded by USAID.  Would funding a feminist theatre company who, amongst their performances, role-play preventative health care, be “woke” and hence suspect?  Women, of course, play an important educational role in health?  Even giving “woke” the widest possible interpretation, projects that might be eligible for this description amount to an infinitesimal percentage of overall expenditure on aid.  And when only a tiny fraction of a state institution’s activities are ill-judged, most people living in the real world would say such an institution was doing well.

Aid is used to strengthen health systems.  HIV, Ebola (funding for prevention frozen, then re-instated), Marburg, West Nile and new lethal viruses do not respect borders.  Can’t aid-detractors recognise even self-interest?

Then there is the recurrent  claim that development aid doesn’t work because it hasn’t jump-started the economies of poor countries.  If that is the criterion, an obvious reply is that it rarely been given a chance to work.   War, bad governance and endemic corruption blight economic development.  If you need to bribe your way through several roadblocks to get to and into a port, export growth will be stunted.  Dealing with a wide range of problems, development aid, which  encompasses many different and vital interventions, makes a major contribution to well-being.

Development aid does make a difference to economies.  If half your workforce is fighting off malaria, and thousands of their children are dying from it, this harms productivity.   As the CEO of an international aid NGO working in three continents, I’ve stood admiring trained senior women in West African villages, some of them illiterate, chatting to mothers as the sun went down, cleverly passing on health messages that reduce infections.  Bonny babies in bathtubs in Africa, midwives learning literacy and becoming better midwives in Yemen,  were a living testimony to the effectiveness of supporting health systems, providing finance and upskilling.

The US Government’s only compliment to virtue was certain temporary waivers to cuts.  A few bits of infrastructure were left standing amongst the wreckage of Federal foreign aid.  The priorities were telling.   Most of the temporary exemptions related to the spending of the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs and the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs.   After 13 February 2025, the latter  received exemption for $5.3 billion expenditure of which $4.1 billion went to Israel and Egypt, plus more moderate sums to Taiwan and the Philippines’ military.  Compare this to the announced USAID exemptions of $78 million for — non-food — aid to Gaza and $156 million to the Red Cross for its work during the current ceasefire.

PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS, launched by President G.W. Bush in 2003, is estimated to have saved 26 million lives around the world.   It was operating in 2025 on 8% of its 2024 budget of $6.5 billion with consequences that hardly need spelling out.  The waiver covered — in theory —  all aspects of provision: antiretrovirals, testing, treatment and supply-chains. But the disruption caused by a 90 day freeze, let alone long term consequences, cost lives.  Money to pay local NGO staff, suddenly disappearing globally, meant an immediate halt to work amongst the world’s poorest people.

No-one denies that despite foreign governmental and NGO funding for development, in much of Africa and parts of Asia, populations remain mired in poverty.   But this does not justify slashing development aid, least of all as if it were a criminal enterprise, what President Trump called “the left-wing scam known as USAID”.

Just two final questions: if and when our children and grandchildren are told in school to consult the Oxford English Dictionary — or will it be AI? — do we want them to find “archaic” in brackets next to the word  “compassion”?  Will they be living in a world in which powerful states deny our common humanity – with devastating consequences in the case of the USA?  We may not have to wait long to find out.

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