Today, Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper MP announced the allocations for the UK’s Official Development Assistance budget over the next three years (to 2028/2029).
Budget allocations analysis by international development umbrella group Bond reveal that regional bilateral UK aid to Africa will decline by 56% from 2024/5 to 2028/9. The analysis also indicates likely cuts to bilateral aid for countries across Africa. Read more of Bond’s analysis here.
In response to the announcement, Dr Aneesa Ahmed, Head of Programmes and Strategic Partnerships, Amref Health Africa in the UK said:
“The past year’s aid cuts have reset the global health architecture, changing the ways in which everyone must work to achieve health for all. The UK Government’s refocus on partnership is welcome, as is safeguarding support for multilateral initiatives such as Gavi and Global Fund, investment in the African Development Fund, and investing in women and girls.
“It sets a new path forward, but it means that we are still making uncertain steps without a real roadmap to bring ODA back to 0.7% of GDP. The fact remains that cutting the UK Aid budget, and reducing the proportion of ODA to Africa, forces the UK to do less in Africa because there is less, at a time of multiple intersecting crises when Africa faces 25% of global disease burden with just 3% of the global health workforce to respond to it.
“For our work in African health these crises are largely conflict, climate shocks, chronic underfunding of systems that need to be resilient in the face of mounting disease burdens and outbreaks. In places like South Sudan, ODA from the UK and other Global North nations held up the health system since independence in 2011. With the security situation deteriorating rapidly and the added strain of refugee and returnee populations from the war in Sudan, South Sudan needs sustainable support through aid and investment to build their system back up—not more cuts which means the UK simply has less to offer.
“We know that African leadership and health sovereignty is key to building solutions in a partnerships approach. Real partnership is based on active listening and placing people in communities at the centre of solutions-building. We are pleased to see the focus on supporting local solutions. This must ensure that African community voices are directing the solutions that will work for them, with the UK lending support and expertise, but also investment where it is most effective for those communities.”
