An executive from the World Bank recently relayed that an arm of the global lender has allocated $100 billion for the disbursement of aid, given the funding deficit that the poorest nations in the world are currently experiencing.
“We have been very clear that the bank remains strongly committed to Africa,” Axel van Trotsenburg, the bank’s senior managing director, said in an interview in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital.
According to preliminary statistics published in April by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), official development aid (ODA) to Africa decreased by 1% to $42 billion in the previous year.
Even if the drop seems small, it represents increasing uncertainty for Africa’s development funding as major donor countries change their objectives, Bloomberg reports.
Following budget cuts by the current administration of the United States and a renewed focus by European countries on defense spending in the face of global security issues, more cuts in aid have been projected.
Africa’s dependence on multilateral funding has increased as a result of donors reallocating funds to internal and geopolitical issues.
“Almost 45% of all our resources are going to Africa,” he said. “Over 70% of the concessional loans will go to Africa.”
Trump aid cuts
In January, shortly after his inauguration, U.S. President Donald Trump decided to impose a 90-day ban on disbursing funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Since then, funding to poor countries has changed dramatically, as a few other lenders decided to follow in Trump’s footsteps.
The agency, which receives the majority of its financing from the United States, opted to make this shift at a time when it was leading an effort to tackle the region’s worst drought in 40 years.
By July, the government of the United Kingdom decided to cut down foreign aid by 40%, with bilateral support for children’s education and women’s health in Africa being among the hardest hit.
These aid cuts have been said to affect security, health, education, and business.
Just weeks after Trump’s executive order to cut funding, his close ally and head of the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk, admitted that the suspension of USAID’s Ebola prevention program was an error, calling it “accidental” and noted that it would be reinstated.
