Aid in a post-aid world

In a world where much foreign policy is in Trumpian disarray, it is hard to spare a thought for multilateralism - just another victim in a global road crash.

- Mark Malloch-Brown

Yet beyond the high-profile hit-and-run victims such as Ukraine or Gaza, special damage is being done to the less visible mechanisms of international cooperation.

Observers noticed that President Trump and the US didn't show up to the recent G20 because they were petulantly boycotting its South African hosts. What they missed was that the first G20 held in Africa had commissioned an important report on global inequality. Its alarming but unsurprising message: inequality is surging. In short, as leaders engage in petty squabbles and increasingly reckless wars, the world burns.

And in a sign of the times, aid, or official development assistance (ODA), has collapsed. Although much of the blame for this has been aimed at Trump, a melting away of public support also made ODA an easy target in other donor countries grappling with budget deficits and increased defence spending. The UK, for example, is cutting aid spending from 0.7% of GDP to 0.3% over a period of several years. Globally, ODA will have fallen by about a third by 2026. According to expert estimates, millions of lives may be lost as food and healthcare systems collapse. It is an extraordinary betrayal.

However, we are where we are and we need, as the G20 and others have recognised, to rebuild development finance in a post-aid and much less collaborative world. Cometh the hour, cometh the two often controversial stalwarts of the multilateral system, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Their two leaders asked me and two colleagues, a former African prime minister and an Asian finance minister, to look at how these institutions could step up. Our report, Facing up to the Future: Navigating Disruption, Building Trust, is just out.