After six continuous years of reducing spending on Official Development Assistance (ODA), the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) has announced its latest spending assessment, which paints a grim picture with projected cuts in some sectors of over 50%.
Prior to the pandemic, Britain prided itself on honoring a yearly commitment to spending 0.7% of its Gross National Income (GNI) on ODA, but that number is expected to fall to less than 0.3% of GNI by the 2028/2029 budgetary cycle with no expectation of recovery in the near future.
In 2025, drastic cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) by the Trump administration garnered worldwide headlines. One year later, Britain is cutting its aid budget in a less dramatic but nonetheless steep and fast manner.
According to the spending assessment, FCDO funding for the Global Polio Eradication Initiative will be slashed entirely. The WISH program, which delivers reproductive health services in the poorest region of the world, is looking at a 30% reduction, and up to 20,000 children are projected to drop out of school because of an end to school food programs.
Perhaps most significantly, bilateral aid to Africa will be reduced by £874 million (nearly US$1.2 billion) by 2028/2029, a reduction of 56% from current levels.
According to a recent study in The Lancet, the cuts to USAID alone are projected to result in an additional 9 million deaths from preventable causes by 2030, 2.5 million of which are children under the age of 5, and Britain joining the race downward in reducing aid is only going to contribute to this unfortunate trend. Total ODA spending amongst G7 countries is already 28% lower in 2026 than it was in 2024, and Britain leads the pack in terms of the highest percentage of aid being cut.
“No winners – just different degrees of losers”
In response to this severe downgrade in British ODA spend, Sarah Champion, International Development Committee Chair, said:
“There will be no winners from these unrelenting aid cuts, just different degrees of losers. The overall picture is desperately bleak for some of the world’s most vulnerable people.”
Beyond just the numbers, the constant reduction in spending and constant shuffling of the responsibility of ODA program implementation between different government departments and bureaucratic hierarchies is leading to a “brain drain” wherein key senior staff are being lost who spent years building vital relationships with foreign governments.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has blamed the drastic cuts to ODA spend on a need to dramatically increase defense spending to counter geopolitical threats. However, the effectiveness of UK ODA spend has been in question for many years, with Britain shifting “aid” money to focus on hosting refugees domestically rather than more traditional avenues such as bilateral development programs, with the OECD issuing a stark warning to Britain in 2024 to get its core mission back on track.
By 2029, Britain is likely to cease all aid to Brazil, Indonesia, India, South Africa, Malawi, Mozambique, and Sierra Leone, replaced by “partnerships for investment,” described by the FCDO as a mission shift of the agency from aid donor to investor as well as delivery of something called “Communities of Expertise,” which the FCDO promised to more fully define later in an official ministerial statement.
According to the development minister, Jenny Chapman, many developing nations welcome these cuts because they prefer “expertise partnerships” with Britain to build stable financial systems and renewable energy supplies over traditional aid programs.
Perhaps most confusingly, the recent official FCDO announcement did not specify country-specific allocations, only naming proposed regional targets. Furthermore, regional groupings have been changed, making it difficult for experts to compare the new spending targets on an apples-to-apples basis. That being said, Africa will definitely see a 56% cut in bilateral aid by 2029, and MENA a 45% reduction, although it is unclear if Afghanistan is still included in the MENA category.
The FCDO announcement also failed to include a detailed breakdown of policy priorities, replacing it with more enigmatic “Thematic Directorates,” one of which is a brand-new label called “Human Development,” which apparently combines the health, education, and gender and equality categories from previous years. Assuming that is the case, this “directorate” will see a combined drop of 52% in spending.
Taking a back seat
The FCDO spending assessment announcement bluntly admits that the reduction in ODA spend will have “negative impacts” but acknowledges that it can only provide a “limited assessment” of these outcomes at this time. Instead of UK-led initiatives and direct assistance programs, the bulk of the dwindling ODA spend going forward will instead be going to multilateral institutions such as regional development banks, the World Bank, and the United Nations.
Spending on climate change was not calculated in the FCDO’s announcement, as it will be “assessed separately” at another time.
According to Yvette Cooper, the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Affairs, Britain will return to spending 0.7% of GNI on ODA “when fiscal circumstances allow.” In the meantime, ODA spend will focus on supporting “financial leverage” and “mobilizing private capital” without offering any concrete details about how that would work.
In 2020, Britain was the third-largest provider of ODA in the world at approximately US$18.6 billion. Assuming the FCDO’s budget targets remain unchanged, this will drop to less than US$10 billion by 2029, including the costs of hosting refugees domestically and some research and development expenditures. Furthermore, starting in 2027, Britain’s ODA budgets will no longer be automatically adjusted to GNI.
Of course, all future plans for British ODA spend remain subject to revision as emerging geopolitical issues, humanitarian crises, and evolving political priorities each have their effect, but the long-term picture is that of Britain increasingly taking a back seat on tackling global poverty reduction, preferring to hand over the reigns to multilateral institutions and betting on the private sector to deliver better outcomes than government-led programs.
