The new Chair of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) is Denmark’s Carsten Staur – an experienced former Minister for International Development Co-operation – who will start his role in March 2023. In a world of overlapping crises, the stakes are too high to fail.

More than two years on from the outbreak of Covid-19, developing countries still have a long way to go to control the pandemic and its effects. Although in 2021 ODA reached a new all-time-high of US$178.9 billion, this is still insufficient to meet the mid-term and long-term challenges ahead of 2030 and the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. Furthermore, in relative terms ODA remained at 0.33 per cent – far from the 0.7 per cent international commitment.

This statement was first published by the DAC-CSO Reference Group.

• Donations of excess vaccines, in-country refugee costs, the use of private sector instruments and debt relief continues to inflate aid figures
• 40 CSOs across the world issue a joint statement calling for more and better-quality ODA

In this joint statement, 77 civil society organisations across the world, including Eurodad, call current ODA levels 'economically unwise and morally flawed' given the current pandemic and interconnected crises, including climate change, conflict, fragility, and rising poverty and inequalities.

The rules on how debt relief should be counted as Official Development Assistance are currently being negotiated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC) – under the auspices of its Chair Susanna Moorehead – and the Paris Club, which is an informal group of creditor governments. 

On 16 April 2020, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released the preliminary statistics on Official Development Assistance (ODA) for 2019.

By Polly Meeks, Senior Policy and Advocacy Officer at Eurodad, Julie Seghers, Advocacy Advisor at Oxfam and Jiten Yumnam, Secretary General at the Centre for Research and Advocacy Manipur 

This is a background paper authored by Jesse Griffiths, Director of Eurodad, on the occasion of the UNCTAD intergovernmental expert group meeting in October 2017.