For the past several months, foreign aid has been in freefall. The massive cuts by the U.S., the world’s largest donor country, provided a new cover for even more announcements of aid budget cuts, with surprisingly little scrutiny or pushback, and disastrous impacts.
Foreign aid cuts mean that in Sudan hundreds of thousands of people have lost access to safe drinking water and food assistance. In Malawi, healthcare has been severely impacted by the aid cuts, with maternal and child health initiatives virtually erased. And this in context of a deepening debt crisis. Across the world, there have been devastating cuts to initiatives that aim to safeguard democracy, defend human rights and provide basis services. This hurts us all.
In response, major reforms in how foreign aid is pledged and delivered are the center of debate in current UN negotiations. The negotiating session at the end of April, leading up to the U.N.’s Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) in Sevilla, Spain, is a critical moment to press for the establishment of a U.N. Framework Convention on International Development Cooperation.
This Convention would shift governance away from exclusive, closed-door decision-making at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to a more representative and democratic process in which all countries can participate. Stability, minimal volatility, and accountability are key goals.
The broken aid system
In the world’s poorest countries, foreign aid makes up over two thirds of external finance, supporting key essential services such as healthcare and education. Yet, the amount of aid reaching the poorest countries in the world has declined recently and dropped 3% in 2024 .
Problematically, the political will to deliver aid commitments has eroded. The United States upended the system this year by defunding its Agency for International Development (USAID). The United Kingdom announced that it would slash its aid budget in favor of military spending. Meanwhile, France and Germany, the European Union’s largest foreign aid providers, have been scaling back their aid spending significantly, with further cuts to come.
In reality, many countries have been evading their commitments for decades, with little scrutiny or pushback. The OECD’s Development Assistance Committee — which counts only wealthy nations as members — has slowly but significantly changed the rules of how aid is measured, inflating the numbers. As a result of a so-called ‘ODA modernisation’ process, rich countries have actually provided even less aid than they’ve reported.
Foreign aid is controlled by a handful of wealthy nations behind closed doors. It’s not entirely surprising that rich countries fail to keep their promises.
This has left aid unreliable, politicized, and out of sync with the needs of the people it’s meant to serve. Millions more people are on the brink of poverty with democracy and human rights in peril, opening the door for worsening global instability. By failing to follow through on their political and financial commitments, rich countries are undermining their capacity to tackle major development challenges today and in the future.
Countries in the global south deserve an alternative, one that will allow foreign aid to be governed in an accountable, transparent and inclusive way—current negotiations present an opportunity to achieve this.
A new UN Framework Convention
A UN convention would establish binding commitments on foreign aid. While conventions still require political will to be successfully implemented, they set a baseline from which governments can be evaluated.
UN Conventions on Climate Change and Biodiversity, for instance, were negotiated with the active involvement of countries of the Global South. Regular summits—Conferences of Parties or COPs—under the auspices of these Conventions have ensured that these issues have remained political priorities and in the public domain, and that wealthy countries are held to account for their commitments.
In putting global foreign aid commitments in a single instrument, countries would combat the fragmentation of international development commitments to date. A new convention would also ensure that all countries—donors and recipients alike—have a seat at the table in setting the rules for foreign aid. The current system protects donors from scrutiny and leaves countries in the global south dependent on whether rich countries honour their pledges. A UN convention would protect the people the aid is meant to serve.
The UN is by no means perfect, and cannot prevent those acting in bad faith from simply ignoring established norms or violating contracts. But if properly equipped, it will expose the behaviour of wealthy donor countries — both good and bad — to a more democratic process. Over time, this will restore public confidence in foreign aid and ensure that it is spent in ways that make a difference, moving millions out of poverty and reducing inequality worldwide.
Given the state of geopolitics, many would argue that the world is too polarised to pursue ambitious agreements at the UN. This attitude is defeatist. History shows that change will happen when sufficient pressure challenges the status quo and raises the level of ambition. The reality is that the current system is broken and it’s time for change.
Vitalice Meja is the Executive Director of Reality of Aid Africa and Matthew Simonds is a Senior Policy and Advocacy Officer for Eurodad
