WASHINGTON, DC – Preliminary data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows that international development assistance from member countries fell by about 23% from 2024 to 2025.
Much of that decline was due to a significant lack of funding from the United States.
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The forum, which includes many major economies from Europe and the Americas, announced Thursday that the United States will see a nearly 57% drop in foreign aid in 2025.
The other top four OECD countries (Germany, UK, Japan, and France) also saw their foreign aid decrease.
The report marks the first time that external development aid from all five OECD countries has declined simultaneously. Total aid in 2025 will be just $174.3 billion, down from $214.6 billion the year before, the largest annual decline since the OECD began recording data.
OECD officials warned that the dramatic decline comes at a time when global economic and food security are being called into question amid the stress of wars between the US and Israel and Iran.
“We are extremely concerned about the significant decline in (development finance) in 2025 due to significant cuts by top donors,” OECD official Carsten Stahl said in a statement.
Preliminary data on Thursday showed that only eight member states have met or exceeded their funding requirements from 2024.
“We are in a time of growing humanitarian needs,” Staoul added, citing increased global uncertainty and extreme poverty. “We can only hope that DAC donors will reverse this negative trend and start increasing (aid).”
The data covers 34 members of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC), which provides the majority of the world’s foreign aid.
However, this figure does not include influential non-DAC countries such as Turkiye, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and China, so the picture of global development assistance is incomplete.
Data tracked by the OECD distinguishes official development assistance from other forms of aid, such as military funding.
The US led “three-quarters of the decline”
In a preliminary assessment, the OECD said the United States “singly caused three-quarters of the economic decline” in 2025, the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term.
President Trump has overseen widespread cuts to U.S. aid infrastructure, including disbanding the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) as part of a broader effort to cut government spending.
According to the OECD, the U.S. provided approximately $63 billion in official development assistance in 2024, falling to just under $29 billion in 2025.
Research this year from the University of Sydney suggests that US funding cuts over the past year have coincided with an increase in armed conflict in Africa, as national resources become increasingly scarce.
Other experts say aid cuts are likely to increase the number of people infected with HIV-AIDS, malaria and polio.
Analysts at the Center for World Development predict that the U.S. cuts will lead to between 500,000 and 1 million deaths worldwide in 2025 alone. recent articles published The medical journal The Lancet found that if development funding “continues on its current downward trend,” there could be more than 9.4 million new deaths by 2030.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, insists it is transforming the U.S. aid model, not avoiding it.
In recent months, China has signed several bilateral aid agreements with African countries, which it claims are in line with its “America First” policy.
But details of such agreements have not been made public, although critics say some negotiations appear to include demands for African countries to access minerals and share health data.
“Turn your back”
Oxfam, a coalition of several non-governmental aid organizations, is among those calling for rich countries to change course following Thursday’s report.
“Wealthy governments are turning their backs on the lives of millions of women, men and children in the Global South with these harsh aid cuts,” Oxfam’s head of development finance Didier Jacobs said in a statement.
Jacobs added that governments are “cutting life-saving budgets while funding conflict and militarization.”
As an example, he pointed to the United States, where the Trump administration is expected to ask for between $80 billion and $200 billion in the U.S.-Israel-Iran war, which is currently suspended amid a delicate ceasefire.
Separately, the administration requested a historic $1.5 trillion for the U.S. military in fiscal year 2027.
“Governments must restore aid budgets and strengthen the world’s humanitarian systems, which are facing their deepest crisis in decades,” Jacobs said.
