International development cooperation, or international aid, has fallen right off the social and political agenda. The UK reneged on its 0.7% of GNI commitment under Boris Johnson’s conservative government in 2021, and reduced aid spending again under the Labour government this year. The US has adopted a more extreme stance, with Donald Trump almost entirely stopping development cooperation through USAID.
These leaders and governments are directly responding to the desires of most of their citizens. YouGov polling shows that as of January 20th 2025, a minority of Britons believe the government is overspending in a variety of areas. 31%, 25% and 14% think the government is spending too much on welfare benefits, the environment and climate change, and defence, respectively. International aid is the only area where the majority of Britons are in agreement, with 64% answering that the government is overspending, its highest level since the poll started in 2019.
Polls like these are surprising when you take into account how much international development cooperation costs the taxpayer, and how this has changed over the last three decades. The UK grew its international development effort substantially between 1997 (0.26% of GNI) and 2013 (0.7% of GNI), and passed a law in 2015 to keep aid at that level. In 2021, in the aftermath of COVID, the Conservative government announced that aid would be temporarily capped at 0.5% of GNI; and in 2025, the Labour government announced that this will be further reduced to 0.3% to finance an increase in defence spending. As aid spending has fallen, the public’s belief that we are spending too much on aid has risen.
However, these figures are not surprising when you take into account the wider domestic and international context. Citizens increasingly expect taxpayers’ money to be used for the benefit of taxpayers, rather than addressing concerns in foreign countries. This is particularly true in tough economic times. Furthermore, there is a growing sense that aid is a decreasingly relevant factor in global development, with broader economic forces like the growth of China and India driving development progress. Even where there is a recognition that aid is needed, there is an increasing unease about the post-colonial dynamic of international aid.
Whilst these concerns hold significant weight, a strong case remains for the international aid system because there remains a clear humanitarian and moral case for richer countries to help with critical development issues in poorer countries. Nobody wants to live in a world where children are still dying unnecessarily from basic health problems or aren’t able to attend school. None of us want to live in a world where HIV patients are unable to access medication. These are precisely the global problems that international aid combats, and has gotten better at combatting over time as economic researchers have scrutinised its delivery.
Given the impact international aid has made in the world, its decline is disastrous for developing countries. Projections by UCLA researchers show that if USAID cuts continue, more than 14 million additional deaths could occur by 2030, including over 4.5 million among children under 5, or about 700,000 extra child deaths per year. And it is equally disastrous for everyone else because international problems require international solutions.
One area that requires international solutions is global health, as evidenced by the COVID pandemic. COVID tore the world apart with millions of deaths and rolling lockdowns that harmed everyone. The UK Treasury estimates it cost the UK government £310 billion to £410 billion, around twice the annual cost of the NHS. One of the priorities of international development cooperation is global health, including fighting infectious diseases and improving hygiene. Cutting funding will not only directly harm our collective ability to fight disease now, it will also diminish our institutional knowledge on how to fight new diseases in the future. We will be even less prepared for the next COVID if we cut the very aid that helps to prevent and manage pandemics.
Global health is one area that requires international cooperation. Another is climate change. We are already seeing increasing levels of extreme weather events—heatwaves, wildfires, droughts and floods—all across the world. These are not the fault of any one country, rather they are the result of our collective pollution and unwillingness to consider substantial individual and societal behavioural change. Climate change cannot be fought by individual nations unilaterally. We’re already seeing wealthy nations set climate targets, and then outsource high carbon activities to poorer nations. In addition, solutions cannot be imposed by wealthy nations, who appear to pull up the drawbridge behind themselves when they dictate that poorer countries can no longer use fossil fuels but fail to provide adequate support. We have witnessed this happen recently with the US withdrawing previously agreed finance from coal reduction agreements with South Africa, Indonesia, and Vietnam. At a time when the world should be considering reparations to poorer countries to help the green transition, cutting international development funding weakens global ties and therefore reduces our collective ability to battle climate change.
Global health and climate change are like a house with faulty wiring. Something is deeply, endemically wrong but, because we can’t see it, we fail to sufficiently invest in it until a crisis occurs. The same can be said for conflict. Conflict represents the very worst of humanity. Violence is appalling and should move us all. The decline of international aid limits our ability to respond to conflict, and to its consequences. We see things on the news, like the Israeli violence in Gaza, and our nations are only able to respond with violence, not with compassion. Furthermore, conflicts are not confined to borders, nor international norms, and therefore any war across the globe threatens our collective safety. This is particularly true in an age of terrorism and technological warfare. The decline of international development limits our ability to prevent conflict through investing in peace-building, and therefore makes us less safe. The Marshall Plan famously engendered a peace dividend in Western Europe that lasts to this day. Less famously, peace processes in Mozambique and Sierra Leone were greatly supported by international development aid.
Unfortunately, some faulty wiring can’t be fixed by international development cooperation. However, this cooperation has an important role to play when electrical fires inevitably start. One example of this is the displacement of people. There are 51.1 million refugees, asylum seekers, and other people in need of international protection worldwide. Many of these people will have been displaced as a result of global health issues, climate change, and conflict. 73% of these individuals are hosted in low and middle income countries, and these countries need financial and humanitarian support. Without this support, refugees and asylum seekers will take dangerous journeys further afield in search of a better life for their families, as any of us would. We have increasingly seen over recent years that this search is causing anger globally and contributing to the rise of the far right. Rather than simple, woefully inadequate, solutions proposed by far right politicians like mass deportations, we would be better served by investing in international development cooperation to prevent the causes of displacement, and to support low and middle income countries that house those who have been displaced.
International development cooperation has fallen right off the political and social agenda, but there remains a strong humanitarian and moral case for it. Global health, climate change, conflict, and the displacement of people all demonstrate that international development cooperation is not only beneficial for its recipients, it is also highly beneficial for all countries as we face a multitude of international challenges which require international solutions. Without it, we are unable to respond to the root causes of a multitude of international issues, and will be forced to deal with their highly expensive consequences later down the line. If anything, international development cooperation is cheap at the price.
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