The trends that shaped global development in 2024

It’s been another big and challenging year for global development — and further uncertainty lies ahead. As we near the end of 2024, we brought a panel of global development leaders together with Devex Pro members to reflect on the year that’s been. In this special edition of the Pro Leader Roundtable, Ndidi Okonkwo Nwuneli, CEO of the ONE Campaign; Sean Callahan, president of Catholic Relief Services; and Hans Peter Lankes, managing director of ODI Global, discussed the forces that shaped global development in 2024 and how their organizations are preparing for 2025. You can scroll to the bottom of this page to watch the full event recording. These are some of the key themes our panel of experts identified in global development this year. The ‘my country first’ approach Unsurprisingly, political changes around the world dominated much of the discussion. While the focus in recent weeks has been on the United States, the speakers pointed out that shifts have happened elsewhere too. “We’ve seen polarization, economic uncertainty, changing leadership,” Nwuneli said. “I have teams in Germany and France and … we’ve seen a lot of political shifts there,” as well as in the U.S. Those changes have made it harder to secure funding for global development causes, she said, highlighting the IDA 21 and Gavi replenishments as examples. “What we’ve learned is that agility is everything,” Nwuneli said. “You need to respond quickly, with the right messages, [going] to the trusted messengers who can push [those messages] where you need them the most.” She also highlighted “the power of data and storytelling” in making the case for global development. Lankes similarly pointed to an overall trend toward “an interest-driven approach” among donors. “[It’s] the ‘my country first’ approach that we’re seeing not just in America” but also in the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, he said. “What we [as global development advocates] have to do is convert this into a mutual interest approach, where we identify … that international engagement in various forms is something that produces mutual benefits.” Aid cuts — and the search for new sources of funding Tied to these political changes, 2024 saw aid cuts among many of the world’s biggest donors, from the U.S. to the U.K. There are also significant concerns about what might happen to the world’s biggest donor after U.S. President-elect Donald Trump takes power next year — after all, his efficiency tsar Elon Musk recently reshared a social media post suggesting that foreign aid should be scrapped completely. “We have fiscal cutbacks. We have reductions in ODA [official development assistance] allocations in the majority of donor countries,” Lankes said. “At the same time, we have increasing needs, increasing gaps, increasing … expectations.” For several years now, he said, “we have collectively understood … that we need to look beyond the traditional, narrow focus of development finance if we want to be able to meet these challenges.” The question that many in the sector have been grappling with is: “How can we bring in other sources of financing? How can we bring in the private sector, how can we … leverage the international financial institutions more than we have? All those issues have been on the table and there’s a growing momentum behind them.” The G20 group of the world's 20 leading economies has focused particularly on the role of multilateral development banks. A road map for MDB reform was produced at this year’s G20 meeting in Brazil and it’s likely to be a focus for next year’s G20 under the presidency of South Africa as well, he said. “The idea is that the multilateral development banks could … become a fairly major part of the solution to the various problems that we’re talking about,” he added. The rise of philanthropy As public funding has fallen, many organizations are relying more on private sources. The speakers noted that philanthropy — which has been growing as a source of funding for development in recent years — is increasingly playing a catalytic or de-risking role, where it helps new models and innovative solutions take off, before public funding comes in to scale them up. As Lankes explained, foundations “have this incredible flexibility — they can do things that public finance is just not capable of doing. They can do it fast; they can make losses without being so terribly concerned about what parliament is going to say back at home. So they can aim for experimentation and for failing. … In a world in which we have to make more out of less … they are an incredibly important piece of the puzzle.” Despite that, Nwuneli said she was “worried” about the political environment. In parts of Europe, foundations working on politically sensitive issues have come under fire from authoritarian-leaning governments, or been caught up in an increasingly divisive environment. In the U.S., some members of the incoming administration have expressed skepticism or hostility toward foundations. “We’re seeing more individuals who are willing to give directly as opposed [to] through formal structures in Europe and the United States,” Nwuneli said. In Africa, things are apparently going in the opposite direction. “I’m very excited about the growth of African philanthropy,” Nwuneli said. “Africans give, and have always given, but making it more strategic, through formalized channels, is something that really excites me.” Localization There was rising momentum behind the localization agenda this year, the speakers agreed. “Recognizing the voices of the countries in which all of us work and recognizing quite frankly the capacity that is in those countries,” as Callahan put it. He pointed to localization strategies within key institutions such as the U.S. Agency for International Development. “I think it was a [year] when more and more of that is accepted,” he said. “We still have to work out the modalities … [but] that recognition is there. And I think those of us who are committed to the agenda see it not only as the right thing to do but also the smart thing to do.” Lankes noted that his think tank, which was formerly known as the Overseas Development Institute, recently rebranded as ODI Global, partly because the concept of “overseas development” is now outdated. “Many of the critical challenges that we face are global in nature,” he said, citing climate change, pandemics, and the backlash against rights, none of which are split along a “global north” and “south” divide. “We have to approach these things differently.” At the same time, Nwuneli said that there is still a long way to go. “It’s a journey,” she said, noting that the onus is on leaders to “create the space” for the necessary changes to happen, but also on civil society and individuals from emerging economies to “fight for that space.” Changing stereotypical narratives about Africa would be a key pillar of the ONE Campaign’s work next year, she added. Collaboration amid crisis There have been a slew of humanitarian crises and conflicts this year — Callahan referred to the situations in Gaza, Sudan, South Sudan, Myanmar, and Venezuela, among others. And he noted that the international community failed to solve many of them; “There was a lot of talk about ceasefires, building peace … and we didn’t get there.” And yet, he said, 2024 was a year when the international development community came together “more than it probably had in the past. I think that there was so much going on and so many issues [that] there was much more sharing of information [and] much more working together than there was competition.” And although resources have been tight, Callahan said there have been successes, such as the community coming together to advocate for a U.S. national security bill earlier this year that unlocked $9.15 billion of humanitarian aid. “Getting some additional resources out really helped all of our organizations to be able to move forward on some of those crisis situations,” he said.