Washington DC – Preliminary data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows that international development assistance from member countries will decline by about 23% from 2024 to 2025.
Much of this decline is due to a lack of funding in the United States.
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The forum, which includes many large economies across Europe and the Americas, said on Thursday that U.S. foreign aid would fall by nearly 57% in 2025.
The OECD’s other four largest contributors – Germany, the UK, Japan and France – also saw a decline in their foreign aid support.
The report marks the first time foreign development aid from all five major OECD donors has been rejected simultaneously. Total aid in 2025 will be just $174.3 billion, down from $214.6 billion the previous year and 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 is in doubt amid the stress of the US-Israel war with Iran.
“It is very worrying to see such a large decline in (development funding) due to dramatic cuts by top donors in 2025,” OECD official Carsten Staur said in a statement.
Preliminary data on Thursday showed only eight member states will meet or exceed their funding from 2024.
“We are in a time of increasing humanitarian need,” Staur added, citing increasing global uncertainty and extreme poverty. “I can only implore DAC donors to reverse this negative trend and start increasing their (support).”
The data includes the 34 member countries of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC), which provides most of the world’s foreign assistance.
However, these numbers provide an incomplete picture of global development assistance because they fail to include influential non-DAC members such as Turkuye, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and China.
Data tracked by the OECD distinguishes official development assistance from other forms of assistance, including military funding.
The United States leads ‘three quarters of the decline’
In its preliminary assessment, the OECD noted that the United States “led three-quarters of the decline” in 2025, the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term.
President Trump has overseen widespread cuts to America’s aid infrastructure, including disbanding the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) as part of a broader effort to reduce government spending.
According to the OECD, the United States contributed about $63 billion in official development assistance in 2024, but decreased to just under $29 billion in 2025.
A University of Sydney study this year found that cuts in U.S. funding over the past year have coincided with a rise in armed conflict in Africa as national resources become more strained.
Other experts have pointed out that cuts to support are likely to lead to a surge in HIV-AIDS, malaria and polio cases.
Analysts at the Center for Global Development estimate that U.S. cuts will result in between 500,000 and 1 million deaths globally in 2025 alone. Recent articles published The medical journal The Lancet found that if “the current downward trend” in development funding continues, there could be more than 9.4 million new deaths by 2030.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has insisted that it is changing the U.S. aid model, not avoiding it.
In recent months, North Korea has signed a handful of bilateral aid agreements with African countries that align with its “America First” agenda.
But while the details of those deals have not been made public, critics note that some of the negotiations appear to include requests for African countries to share mineral access or health data.
‘Turn your back’
Oxfam, a coalition of several non-governmental aid groups, was among those urging rich countries to change course after Thursday’s report.
“Rich governments are turning their backs on the lives of millions of women, men and children in the Global South with severe aid cuts,” Didier Jacobs, Oxfam’s head of development finance, said in a statement.
Jacobs added that the government was “financing conflict and militarization while simultaneously cutting life-saving aid budgets.”
As an example, he pointed to the United States, where the Trump administration is expected to request $80 billion to $200 billion for the U.S.-Israel war with Iran, which is currently halted by a tenuous ceasefire.
The administration separately requested a historic $1.5 trillion for the U.S. military during fiscal year 2027.
“Governments must restore aid budgets and strengthen the global humanitarian system as it faces its most serious crisis in decades,” Jacobs said.
