Some countries still want to save the world

If the world has had enough of helping others, then somebody forgot to tell Spain.

Yes, Spain. The same country that, a little more than a decade ago, desperately accepted billions in bailout money from its European neighbors to keep its economy afloat. That Spain is now doing something almost unthinkable. It’s ramping up aid spending just as the United States notoriously retreats. And in the process, Spain is trying to remind the world why we give back in the first place.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) — the world’s largest humanitarian aid donor by far, whose work in recent years saved upward of a million lives per year — was officially dismantled earlier this month. Its scattered remains were subsumed by the State Department and its empty headquarters given to the FBI. But America isn’t the only one putting itself first these days. The UK, France, Belgium, and Germany all slashed their development budgets this year thanks to a wave of right-wing populism painting foreign aid as an unnecessary expense against the national interest.

The crisis is steep. The pot of money going to global development is set to shrink by 17 percent, or $35 billion, in 2025, on top of a $21 billion drop the year before, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That’s a $56 billion funding vacuum where global aid for mosquito nets, vaccine research, and food assistance used to be. And the declines are likely to become even steeper in the years ahead, as cuts in the US take full effect.

But while President Donald Trump was gutting USAID, Spain made moves to rebuild its aid agency and committed to more than doubling its aid budget by 2030. Nor is it alone: Ireland, South Korea, and Italy also all made recent pledges to boost their foreign aid budgets.

It’s far from enough to fill the foreign aid gap, however. And while the pain will fall primarily on impoverished recipient countries, foreign aid doesn’t just help the countries that receive it. It helps everyone.

Diseases and conflict don’t recognize legal borders and aid helps keep these deadly problems at bay. Every $100 million spent on preventing tuberculosis, HIV, and malaria helps prevent about 2.2 million new infections total. And global cuts are already expected to exacerbate the spread of diseases; former USAID officials anticipate cuts from the US alone could cause 28,000 new cases of infectious diseases like Ebola and Marburg each year. “Even if you’re in this isolationist mindset, you can’t actually isolate yourself from the rest of the world,” said Rachael Calleja, a research fellow at the Center for Global Development.

The fact that some countries have managed to fight the impulse to isolate — convincing their citizens that problems abroad are interconnected with our problems at home — could help reshape the future of aid for the better. Their decisions point to the possibility of a new future for foreign aid that could be more collaborative and less paternalistic than before.

Aid has long been dominated by a small club of wealthy nations — chief among them the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom — that give the most, and in doing so, set the tone for how to help the rest of the world. Too often these well-intentioned solutions perpetuated the same exploitative power dynamics that made poor countries poor and one-time colonial powers like Spain and Italy rich in the first place. Western aid often comes with strings attached, like forcing Mali to privatize its cotton industry or requiring that funds be spent on consultants and supplies from the donor country — even though such policies have been shown to make aid less effective and much more expensive.

Ready or not, the old club’s grip on global influence is now breaking down.

”Nobody who works in development sat around saying, ‘The system is great. We’re awesome. Let’s just spend more money to do more of the same,’” said Dean Karlan, who was, until recently, the chief economist at USAID. “There is a blank slate. Let’s put in place a better system.”

Spain, Ireland, Italy, and South Korea are all increasing aid — but most have a lot of room for growth.

The United Nations set a lofty goal in the 1970s for wealthy countries to give away 0.7 percent of their gross national income (GNI) as development assistance. Half a century later, almost none do.

That includes this year’s overachievers. Ireland spent 0.57 percent of its GNI — $2.47 billion — on development aid last year. Spain spent 0.25 percent or $4.35 billion, and Italy, 0.28 percent or $6.67 billion. South Korea spent 0.21 percent or $3.94 billion.

It’s not a lot, especially compared to the $63.3 billion the US spent in 2024, although that only added up to 0.22 percent of its GNI. But these countries are moving forward at a time when everyone else seems to be moving backward. According to the global development consultancy SEEK Development’s donor tracker, the US is now projected to spend just 0.13 percent of its GNI on overseas aid this year.

There is a growing recognition that someone has to fill the gaps left by the US, but everybody balks at the price tag, Arturo Angulo Urarte, a Madrid-based development expert, said in Spanish. “It’s like, ‘Yes, but gosh, and how much does that mean? Oh, it means money? Well, then no.’”

Spain’s aid increase, however, has been a long time coming. Spanish activists launched a kind of Occupy Wall Street in favor of overseas aid back in the 1990s. A group of global development workers and grassroots activists staged hunger strikes and protest encampments, chaining themselves to government buildings to demand that Spain give at least 0.7 percent of its GNI to aid. At the time, Spain was giving around 0.24 percent of its GNI to aid, but the protests helped propel the country to double its commitment to a high of nearly 0.5 percent in 2008.

Then the 2008 economic turmoil left Spain once again with a wisp of an foreign aid budget. By the time its economy crawled closer to pre-crisis levels in 2015, its development spending had cratered to 0.12 percent of GNI.

But the idea of Spain becoming a bigger player in global development never really left the public consciousness, remaining broadly popular even during the country’s worst financial straits. In 2023 the country passed a law promising to rebuild its aid agency and bump up spending to 0.7 percent of GNI by 2030 — effectively tripling its current rate.

Spain has since increased its aid budget to about 0.25 percent of its GNI, or $4.4 billion last year — roughly $490 million more than it spent the year prior at 0.24 percent of its GNI — and says it will continue to give more in the year ahead. That’s more money for climate resilience projects in Morocco and Algeria, LGBTQ rights in Paraguay, and HPV vaccine campaigns across Latin America and the Caribbean.

The dismantling of USAID has destroyed longstanding and hard-won infrastructure for implementing aid programs, especially in critical areas like HIV prevention. There’s little that anyone can do to bring that infrastructure back, but countries like Spain, Ireland, or South Korea have been able to uplift and increase funding to the initiatives most affected by the cuts, like Gavi, the international vaccine alliance, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Ireland also aims to increase its aid spending to 0.7 percent of GNI by 2030. It inched closer to that goal this year by boosting its development budget by about $40 million to $925 million. “We wouldn’t expect Ireland to be able to fill the USAID gap in any shape or form,” Jane-Ann McKenna, who heads Dóchas, an umbrella group for Irish development organizations, said. “But that’s where our positioning and our voice becomes more important.”

That said, foreign aid has always been about more than just charity. It’s a geopolitical tool that countries have used for decades to win friends and influence people.

It’s no coincidence that, according to a 2006 study, US aid increased about 59 percent to nations when they temporarily joined the UN Security Council. The birth of PEPFAR — the HIV/AIDS program that saves around a million lives per year, which makes it perhaps America’s most effective ever form of foreign aid — helped boost public opinion of the US across sub-Saharan Africa. Much of Italy’s recent aid budget has gone to its $6 billion Mattei Plan in Africa, which aims to collaboratively influence the continent’s energy development and migration flows, but which some critics contend recreates old colonial patterns by relying too heavily on European priorities — not local expertise — to decide where the money ought to go and how its vision should take shape.

But if you take countries like Ireland and Spain at their word, their approach to foreign aid is not just about soft power anymore. These countries also have something in common that can differentiate them from other larger donors: recent histories of underdevelopment. Some of the newcomers might have been aid recipients rather than donors just a few decades ago.

South Korea received billions in foreign aid in the decades after the Korean War, which helped it grow to the point where it became the first former recipient to join OECD’s forum for major aid providers in 2010. Spain’s wealthier neighbors offered the country major financial support when it began integrating with Europe in the 1980s in the aftermath of the Franco dictatorship.

That dynamic can make it easier, Calleja says, to empathize with others who need aid today. (Though let’s not forget that Spain once colonized much of Latin America and the Caribbean — places that now receive the bulk of Spanish foreign aid — and therefore laid the groundwork for many patterns of exploitation and inequality there that its aid now seeks to resolve.)

Ireland was never a colonizer, but was once colonized itself by Britain. That legacy, McKenna said, means that many Irish people are passionate about human rights abroad and highly supportive of overseas aid.

“We have the history of the famine and we’ve had conflict on the island and we’ve had to engage in a whole peace process ourselves,” McKenna explained. “That’s there in the background of all of our psyches.”

As these smaller players like to say, it’s about “solidarity.” Spain’s own development agency’s four-year plan mentions the word solidarity 84 times. It explicitly calls for a move away from the old model, where wealthy nations dictated terms to grateful recipients, and toward a more equitable and collaborative model built on shared priorities and mutual respect.

Of course, not everybody is buying it.

Henry Morales is an economist and director of the Movimiento Tzuk Kim-Pop, a Guatemalan human rights group. He let out a little laugh when I asked him about Spain’s solidarity plan. After all, he’s seen foreign funders renege on their promises before.

He’s seen European powers pledge numerous times to do more to promote climate resilience in low-income countries before watching them give up when the politics become too difficult. Spain’s plan for development stresses that it aims to approach its funding priorities — like combating climate change and promoting gender equality — from a place of consistency and genuine partnership, the kind that can’t be abandoned on a whim when a new government takes power.

Whether Spain’s plan represents a form of global reparations or just colonialism with better PR remains to be seen, he said, but regardless, the old top-down model is clearly cracking.

Countries who receive aid now want “a voice and a vote, so that the decisions are no longer made by a private club of the big donors, the big traditional financiers,” he said. “But by debates and global agreements that are much more transparent and much more democratic.”

Fifty countries in the Global South now have their own agencies to exchange ideas, technical advice, and reciprocal funds for solving poverty, fighting climate change, and improving education.

Ensuring that recipients have a big say in how aid gets around is not only good for building a better, more democratic system — it can also make it much more efficient. According to Vox’s previous reporting in 2022, aid programs tend to work better when people from the countries they’re targeting play a big role in directing how and where the money’s used. Morales thinks that kind of collaboration is the real future of aid, which he prefers to see not as charity but as “simply the fair distribution of wealth.”

He’s not the only one who thinks so. The director-general of the World Trade Organization, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, called foreign aid “a thing of the past” at a meeting with African leaders in February.

For his part, Karlan, the former USAID economist, doesn’t think USAID will ever come back as the acronym or institution it once was, and although that’s mostly a very bad thing, he sees a flicker of opportunity.

Still, he isn’t sure if he believes that a real change to the aid paradigm is afoot. “Solidarity strikes me as a little bit of a softer way of saying soft power,” he mused, even if countries like Spain or Ireland aren’t necessarily “looking for flyover rights for the military.”

What he is sure of is that the US is moving in a very different direction. If Spain’s soft power is softening, then the United States’ is calcifying into something more toxic, more transactional, and — as Karlan likes to add — less efficient than before.

“Imagine a marriage in which you never did something considerate for your partner just because you cared about them,” he said. Instead, everything is a negotiation. “That isn’t a healthy relationship. What we’re risking is losing these long-term relationships, those long-term friendships.”

By the time the US is ready to reopen the door on them, it may find a world that has already moved on.