Development assistance: the EU must do more

In a joint statement with 40 organisations, Caritas Europa calls on the international donor community, including the EU, to allocate development assistance to match increasing needs and reflect corresponding solidarity with people experiencing poverty and marginalisation across the world.

On 12 April 2023, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) announced that over the course of 2022, the countries part of the Development Assistance Committee allocated 204 billion USD to Official Development Assistance (ODA).

The figure is largely impacted by the redirection of ODA to the humanitarian response in Ukraine – reconstruction and recovery and the hosting of refugees inside donor countries (e.g. in EU Member States).

The scale of the conflict in Ukraine and the massive displacement it has caused requires a large-scale humanitarian response as well as longer-term investments and reconstruction efforts. While the international donor community has demonstrated timely and comprehensive support to Ukraine, crises elsewhere driven by poverty, poor governance, climate change, inequality and conflict continue and deepen with far less attention and support, both financially and politically.

Civil society organisations have long argued that the human rights obligations of all states to receive refugees should not be used as an excuse for aid providers to spend development budgets at home, reducing vital resources for people living in poverty globally.

The significant redirection of development assistance from poverty reduction, resilience, peace-building, and climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts in the world’s poorest and most fragile contexts towards refugee costs in donor countries is a complete departure from ODA’s core objective of measuring donor efforts that contribute to sustainable development in developing countries. It risks undermining long-term development efforts, leaving people experiencing poverty and marginalisation behind, and can have long-lasting global implications, including for peace and stability.

The 2022 figures indicate that most aid allocated last year was not enough and was not ODA: with global crises growing in scale and severity, ODA levels must match increasing needs for sustainable development worldwide.