In its recent report entitled “The 2017 DATA Report: Financing the African Century”, Ngo ONE revealed that in 2016, global official development aid stood slightly above $140 billion, rising 7.4% compared to 2015. This amount represents 0.31% of the revenues of donor countries.   

The rise, according to the Ngo, is mainly due to the fact that many donors, in Europe mostly, significantly increased the share of their aid allocated to refugee support. “DAC donors spent $15.4 billion (current prices) on in-donor refugee costs in 2016, an increase of 27% from the previous year,” ONE said.

In 2016, countries like Germany and Italy spent more on refugee support than on development aid for Africa. Four donors, namely Greece, Italy, Austria and Hungary, spent more than half of their bilateral aid on refugee support.

“Aid is not being allocated to the countries where it is needed most. The share of aid to the poorest countries has continued to decline, from 32% of all aid going to least developed countries in 2013 to 28% in 2016, and the share of aid to Africa declined from 33% in 2015 to 32% in 2016,” the report adds.

Regardless of all these, ONE admitted that in the long term, much progress was made to fight poverty. Indeed, it said: “In 1990, approximately 35,000 children on average died every day from preventable and treatable diseases. Twenty-five years later, that number has been nearly cut in half and over 18,600 fewer children die each day from these causes.1 Over this same period, nearly 1.1 billion people worldwide have been lifted out of extreme poverty”.