There is an emerging constant in the world of development cooperation: if a crisis emerges, the official development assistance (ODA) is reliably there to soften the impact. In these last few years of crisis after crisis, we have witnessed two distinct phenomena when it comes to ODA budgets – inflation and diversion. The COVID-19 pandemic and the distribution of excess vaccines being counted as ODA has made ODA figures look much greater than they are. More recently, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resulting refugee crisis have some providers reallocating existing resources as opposed to increasing them. The consequences for Low-Income Countries depend on ODA in some cases for up to two-thirds of external development financing cannot be understated. Read more here.
Source: CPDE