“It is not an announcement that I am happy to make”, But the safety of the British is “The number one priority of this government”. Keir Starmer acted on Tuesday, February 25, the reduction of the budget devoted to international development aid on Tuesday 25, February 25, which will drop from 0.5% to 0.3% of the United Kingdom’s GDP, in order to enhance defense. A decision “Unconscious” and a “Treshing of the most vulnerable people on our planet”castigated the NGO Actionaid in the process.
The British Prime Minister is not the first Western leader to tighten the screw. Faced with budgetary pressures and national priorities, several countries have saved in their development aid in recent months-starting with the United States, the world’s leading contributor with 64.7 billion dollars paid in 2023 according to the OECD. On the day of his arrival in power on January 20, Donald Trump signed a decree ordering a freezing of foreign aid – with the exception of military aid in Israel and emergency food aid – for 90 days, for a complete review.
Discounts everywhere in Europe
In France, the 2025 finance law deprived the public aid mission (ADA) to the development of more than two billion euros. A cup which is added to the 800 million euros eliminated in February 2024. The Netherlands intend to reduce the annual budget allocated to development assistance of 2.4 billion euros from 2027. The Dutch government will gradually eliminate the financing of gender equality programs and will limit the financing linked to the climate.
The objective of this restructuring? Fight against irregular immigration. “From now on, Dutch interests will have priority”promised the Minister of Foreign Trade Reinette Klaver in a statement last week. The Netherlands are planning to invest more in regional refugee assistance programs and to strengthen cooperation in migration with the main countries of transit and origin, such as Morocco and Uganda.
Germany and Sweden follow the same path. German development aid has been reduced by a billion euros for 2025 while Stockholm intends to lower its donations by 975 million crowns (84 million euros) compared to last year, according to Devex. If public development aid reached a record level in 2023, carried out in particular by supporting Ukraine, the wind is indeed turning, to the detriment of the beneficiary countries, but not only.
A boon for China
“This disengagement will very much benefit, a priori, to Chinese interestsalert Emmanuel Lincot, researcher at the iris and the fine sinologist. Beijing seeks to have Taiwan’s belonging to China recognized as many states as possible and, more broadly, to create a form of moral debt of the Third World elites. »» Xi Jinping did not wait for these discounts to advance his pawns. The Chinese president announced more than $ 50 billion over three years in African countries at the Sino-African cooperation forum last September.
“” If Donald Trump does not go back and keeps the course during his entire mandate, the situation will be difficult to make up for ”insists the professor at the Catholic Institute of Paris, evoking the previous one of UNESCO. Washington had left UNESCO in October 2017, under the chairmanship of Donald Trump, denouncing the “Persistent anti-Israeli biases” of this institution. In July 2023, under the leadership of Joe Biden, the United States had returned to the organization to counter the growing influence of China.
Geopolitologist Gérard Vespierre wants to be more prudent. “Everything is not played. Donald Trump is very fluctuating in his speecheshe recalls. This orientation vis-à-vis international aid is not inscribed in marble. »» For the time being in any case, the American president does not seem ready to give up, despite the calls of the founder of Microsoft and wealthy American philanthropic Bill Gates. Sunday evening, his administration placed on administrative leave remunerated almost all of the 4,700 employees of the American agency for international development (USAID) and announced the dismissal of 1,600 of them.
