We’re faced with a humanitarian emergency here which is unfolding in plain sight and it’s only going to get worse as the rainy season sets in. Our cities are burning, our villages are being erased, survival really has replaced living here and it’s like we’re invisible to the world.”
The words from my colleague based in Juba in South Sudan echo around my head as I sit in a packed conference room in London. Outside, the UK capital hums along under a familiar grey sky, the weather is mild and manageable. It’s a far cry from the relentless, suffocating heat and impending rains she is describing, a country on the frontlines of the climate crisis.
The foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, has convened the Global Partnerships conference this week to tackle “shared challenges”, following the announcement last year that the UK would cut an estimated £6 billion from the overseas budget by 2027 to fund an increase in defence spending.
The UK government has framed these cuts as “reforms”, but global cuts are already having a devastating impact on people they were meant to support – access to clean water and sanitation is under threat, climate shocks are hitting harder and more often, and progress on gender equality is being rolled back. Reducing aid is a political choice, and one that risks turning our backs from communities already living with the consequences of issues they did little to cause.
Back in March, when the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) first revealed its priorities for the overseas aid budget, Ms Cooper confirmed a reduction in “direct grant funding” to several countries in Africa. While Oxfam welcomes the protection of allocations to Sudan, cuts elsewhere will hit countries like neighbouring South Sudan, which hosts almost half a million Sudanese refugees and is one of the world’s most fragile and climate-affected states.
At a time when local organisations need more flexible and direct support to respond to rapidly changing crises, cuts to aid risk further weakening locally led responses and concentrating decision-making in distant systems rather than with communities themselves.
My mind goes back to the conversation with my colleague in Juba. “Armed actors arrived in the middle of the night taking everything they could: vehicles, equipment, assets.” She described how quickly reality can shift on the ground – one moment there is clean running water: the next, it’s gone. Communities have to be able to make assessments on how money is invested and do so quickly.
Across the Global South, colleagues and communities are saying the same thing. At a time when many countries are facing the compounded effects of conflict, climate change and economic systems shaped by colonial legacies, reducing direct support only deepens existing inequalities.
If the government is serious about reforming aid, it means leaving paternalism behind in favour of real partnership, listening to Global South calls to move power and resources to local communities, and recognising that decisions cannot be channelled through large and distant systems. It requires flexible, agile funding that can respond in real time, whether to flooding in Mozambique or cholera outbreaks which are on the rise globally.
With less aid, how the remaining budget is used matters more than ever. The government says it is shifting towards “partnerships for investment”, delivered through British International Investment (BII). BII has received substantial aid funding despite evidence it is investing in private health and education companies linked to serious human rights abuses. Only 14 per cent of BII’s investments are in the world’s least developed countries which risks deepening, rather than reducing, poverty and inequality. If the government is serious about moving from aid to investment, it must choose the right partners – those that are genuinely locally led.
There is also a wider question about the global financial system itself. High levels of debt and an unfair international tax system continue to drain resources from many countries in the Global South – money that could be invested in public services, crisis response and long-term resilience. At the same time, Oxfam research shows billionaire wealth is rising at extraordinary speed: last year the world saw a record number of billionaires created, with a collective wealth of $18.3 trillion, while nearly half the world’s population continues to live in poverty. There is enough money to tackle poverty and climate breakdown, but political choices continue to protect concentrated wealth while aid budgets are cut. A genuine partnership approach should extend here too, with the UK backing Global Majority-led efforts on debt relief, fairer tax systems and reforms that keep more resources in-country.
We need to rethink how development is financed and delivered. That means radically reforming the global development system – tackling inefficiencies, embracing innovation, and ensuring every pound goes further for the people it is meant to support. It means using new approaches from impact investing, where money is invested to generate both social benefit and financial return, to outcomes-based finance, where funding is tied to achieving agreed results. It also means radically reforming the way international NGOs work, shifting power and resources closer to communities and rethinking the role of organisations based in the Global North.
We have a rare opportunity to change course. The FCDO’s Global Partnerships conference should be a moment to reset and build a development model that is more responsive, more equitable and more effective – and to move beyond incremental change towards the radical reform the sector has long needed, putting power and funding where they belong.
Richard Hawkes is the CEO of Oxfam GB
This article has been produced as part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project
