Official Development Assistance (ODA)
ODA as percent of GNI (grant equivalent) in 2025, by Development Assistance Committee (DAC) members
Percent of GNI
Notes: Green bars represent providers that met or exceeded the UN target of 0.7% ODA/GNI in 2025. Not all DAC members have set a domestic target for ODA as a share of GNI. Data for 2025 are preliminary. Source: OECD (2026)
Finance
Global ODA fell 23% in 2025, its steepest drop ever, as Germany overtook the US as the top donor
Official Development Assistance, or ODA, is government aid that targets economic development and welfare in developing countries. The OECD’s Development Assistance Committee adopted it as the “gold standard” of foreign aid in 1969. In 2025, that standard faced its steepest single-year decline on record.
What Counts as ODA
Three criteria define ODA. It must come from official government sources. It must target economic development and welfare specifically. And it must flow to a country on the OECD’s official recipient list.
The Development Assistance Committee, founded in January 1960 under the OECD’s predecessor organisation, sets the reporting standards behind these figures. It now includes 33 member countries, each reporting its aid flows on a common basis.
In 1970, wealthy nations committed at the UN to give 0.7% of gross national income as ODA. More than fifty years later, only a handful of countries, mostly in Scandinavia and Luxembourg, consistently meet that target.
The 2025 Collapse, in Numbers
Total ODA from DAC members fell to $174.3 billion in 2025, a 23.1% real-terms decline from 2024. This followed an earlier 6% drop in 2024, meaning aid has now fallen for two consecutive years.
Every category of financing shrank. Bilateral ODA fell 26.4%, with bilateral grants down 29.1%. Multilateral ODA declined for a second straight year, down 12.6%. Core contributions to the United Nations fell a record 27%.
Humanitarian assistance absorbed the sharpest relative cut of all, down 35.8% globally. Development programmes, projects, and technical cooperation fell 26.3%. Almost no category of aid emerged from 2025 untouched.
The US Cut That Reshaped the Rankings
The United States drove most of this collapse. Washington cut its ODA by 56.9% in 2025, the largest single-year cut by any donor in the history of ODA reporting, following USAID’s dissolution in July 2025.
That cut alone caused roughly three-quarters of the entire global ODA decline in 2025. For the first time since 2003, the US lost its position as the world’s largest donor, a title it had held for more than two decades.
Germany took first place instead, providing $29.1 billion, only marginally ahead of the US at $29.0 billion. The UK ranked third at $17.2 billion, followed by Japan at $16.2 billion and France at $14.5 billion.
This marks the second consecutive year that France, Germany, the UK, and the US all cut ODA simultaneously, the first time this had happened even once in nearly 30 years, before 2024.
Why 2025 Happened: A Convergence, Not One Cause
Each major cut had its own domestic driver. The US cut stemmed from the new Trump administration’s decision to dismantle USAID entirely within its first year in office, dissolving a 64-year-old agency.
Germany’s cut reflected fiscal consolidation under a new government facing a €171 billion federal deficit. France’s cut followed political instability, with three prime ministers in under two years each making further reductions. The UK and Netherlands cut aid to fund domestic priorities, including defence spending and asylum costs.
Despite different causes, the effect compounded globally. When the world’s largest donors cut in the same years, no group of smaller donors can realistically offset the total, regardless of their own individual commitments.
2026: A Partial, Uneven Recovery
The OECD projects a further 5.8% decline in global ODA for 2026, meaning aid has not yet found a floor. However, 2026 also brought the first signs of political pushback against the cuts.
In the US, Congress restored significant funding the administration had wanted cut. The FY2026 State, Foreign Operations Act, signed February 3, 2026, allocated $50 billion for global diplomacy and aid, nearly 60% more than the administration’s original request, though still 16% below 2025 levels.
The Netherlands saw a sharper reversal. Its Wilders-aligned coalition collapsed after just one year, and a new government under Rob Jetten, sworn in February 2026, committed to reinvesting in humanitarian aid, climate, education, and women’s rights.
Other donors show no comparable reversal yet. Germany’s development budget is still projected to fall to 0.43% of GNI by 2029. France’s ODA is projected to fall to 0.38% of GNI in 2026, its lowest level since 2016. Finland’s aid will shrink 25% overall between 2024 and 2027.
Impact on Women’s Organizations and NGOs
Cuts of this scale hit specialised organisations hardest. A UN Women survey of 411 organisations across 44 crisis-affected countries found 90% reported financial harm in 2025, with nearly half expecting to close within six months.
At least 81 NGOs closed at least one office by April 2025 as a direct result of funding losses. Analysts estimate USAID’s dismantling alone could cause over 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million children under five.
Gender-based violence programming faced disproportionate cuts. Nearly $400 million in terminated US grants specifically targeted this area, and most surviving humanitarian waivers explicitly excluded gender-related programmes from continued funding.
How ODA Connects to the SDGs
ODA is one of the primary financing tools behind the 2030 Agenda. Many low-income countries depend on it for over two-thirds of their external financing, making it foundational rather than supplementary to their development budgets.
When ODA falls, progress against specific goals falls with it. Reduced health aid threatens SDG 3. Falling education funding undermines SDG 4. Cuts to women’s programming weaken SDG 5, on gender equality, directly and immediately.
ODA also measures SDG 17 itself, on global partnerships, since the goal explicitly tracks whether wealthy nations meet their 0.7% commitment. In 2025, only Norway, Luxembourg, Sweden, and Denmark met that target.
Because aid flows through nearly every sector, its cuts create ripple effects across almost all seventeen goals simultaneously. This is why RYB tracks ODA trends across its country pages as a leading indicator of a nation’s real development commitment, not just its stated policy.
A Pattern That Reflects Politics, Not Fixed Policy
ODA levels are political choices, not fixed national character. The Netherlands’ reversal within eighteen months of its own historic cuts shows this clearly, as does the US Congress’s partial restoration against the administration’s original request.
RYB tracks this pattern in detail across individual country pages, including the United States, Netherlands, Germany, France, and Finland, each showing how elections, coalitions, and budget crises reshape aid commitments year to year.
For recipient countries, this volatility carries real costs. Nepal, for example, saw more than 300 NGOs lose funding, when USAID froze operations in 2025, arriving just as the country manages its own transition out of Least Developed Country status.
Looking Forward
ODA enters the second half of this decade smaller, more volatile, and more explicitly tied to donor countries’ domestic politics than at any point in recent memory. Whether 2026’s partial reversals in the US and Netherlands spread to other donors remains genuinely uncertain.
Germany and France show no comparable signs of reversal yet, with both projecting further declines through 2029 and 2026 respectively. Whether new elections in either country could change that trajectory, as happened in the Netherlands, is worth watching closely.
The next full OECD dataset, expected December 2026, will confirm final 2025 figures and offer the first real read on whether 2026’s projected 5.8% decline materialises as forecast. RYB will update this page as new data and country-level policy decisions emerge.
Sources and References
- OECD, “A historic decline in foreign aid: preliminary 2025 ODA data” — oecd.org
- OECD, “International aid fell sharply in 2025” (press release) — oecd.org
- OECD, “Cuts in official development assistance: Full Report” — oecd.org
- OECD Development Assistance Committee overview — oecd.org
- Focus 2030, “Historic drop in Official Development Assistance in 2025” — focus2030.org
- UN Women, “At a breaking point: The impact of foreign aid cuts on women’s organizations” — unwomen.org
- Center for Global Development, “US Congress Says Yes to Foreign Aid” — cgdev.org
- NPR, “Congress passes $50 billion foreign aid bill, despite Trump’s cuts in 2025” — npr.org
- Countdown 2030 Europe, Netherlands country profile — countdown2030europe.org
- Donor Tracker, Germany and France 2026 budget policy updates — donortracker.org