The United Kingdom voted on June 23 to leave the European Union, sending financial markets into an historic spiral and intensifying worries in the aid community about how jobs, funding streams and EU development cooperation will shift in the wake of the Brexit referendum.
The precipitous drop in the value of the British pound immediately shrunk aid budgets globally by about 8 percent for U.K.-based organizations. The U.K.’s 11.8 billion pound aid budget lost more than 1 billion pounds in global value overnight, and aid organization heads are facing tough decisions about where and how regional offices will make savings if markets don’t recover.
Contracts and grants from EU institutions are also in jeopardy, as stakeholders on both the EU and U.K. sides prepare for what looks to be a long and unprecedented period of readjustment.
About the author
Molly Andersmollyanders_dev
Molly Anders is a former U.K. correspondent for Devex. Based in London, she reports on development finance trends with a focus on British and European institutions. She is especially interested in evidence-based development and women’s economic empowerment, as well as innovative financing for the protection of migrants and refugees. Molly is a former Fulbright Scholar and studied Arabic in Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Morocco.
