Belgium just cut its foreign aid by 25%. Does anybody care?

Belgium will cut its foreign aid budget by 25% over five years under a new coalition deal struck at the end of last month. Yet, despite the drastic reduction, the head of Belgium’s bilateral aid agency, Enabel, said his phone has been quiet. “You are the first journalist who called me on that,” Jean Van Wetter told Devex late last week, citing a drop in public interest in and understanding of development cooperation. “For me the movement of international NGOs was born in the ‘70s and ‘80s and ‘90s, where you had a generation very involved. But I think we lost in a way the public support over the last 10 years,” he said. “Even my closest friends … still think that we are helping poor people only by constructing a well, by renovating a school. They don’t understand that we work on climate, on energy transition, on security issues, on governance issues.” The cut — covering funding to multilateral organizations, humanitarian aid, civil society, and Enabel — could have been worse. When parties began talks after the June 2024 election, a 60% cut to foreign aid was on the table, before being negotiated down to 50% and then 25%. Van Wetter said the centrist party, Les Engagés, and center-left, Vooruit, were more favorable to development cooperation than the liberal-conservative Mouvement Réformateur and Flemish nationalist Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie whose leader, Bart De Wever, will become prime minister. De Wever succeeds Alexander De Croo, who spent six years as development minister before becoming prime minister in 2020. The role of development minister will also disappear under the new coalition government, with the portfolio integrated into that of foreign minister Maxime Prévot from Les Engagés. Van Wetter sees that merger as a good thing, arguing it provides “consistency and leverage” and better connects development cooperation to the activities of Belgian universities and companies. “To be honest with you, it’s partly why we maybe lost the public traction,” Van Wetter said, “because the development cooperation sector used to be too much in this bubble, in silos and disconnected from the rest.” The NGO group, CNCD 11.11.11., welcomed the fact that, despite the merger at ministerial level, the coalition agreement foresees the continuation of a separate department to manage the aid budget. Though the advocacy group regretted the coalition’s intention to focus on Belgium’s own interests in its development policy, such as through collaboration with Belgian pharmaceutical firms when seeking to improve access to affordable medicines. Van Wetter said it will be up to the government to decide how to implement the 25% cut, but that clearly, “we need to make choices.” “If you say you reduce 25% a bit everywhere and then you become insignificant in a sector, then what’s the point of still being in this?” he said. For Van Wetter, this could mean investing more in places where Belgium can have the greatest leverage, likely in concert with other European donors, as well as areas of its expertise, such as global health, the clean energy transition, and agriculture and food systems. The cuts in Belgium (the 18th-biggest aid donor by size and 13th as a proportion of GNI in 2023) follow a series of major European donors reducing development cooperation budgets in recent months, from France to Germany to Sweden to the Netherlands to the European Commission itself. Not to mention the drastic erosion of the U.S. Agency of International Development under U.S. President Donald Trump’s new administration. Van Wetter doubts that the U.S. will do away with its aid entirely. He predicts instead a more “political” approach, closely tied to the U.S. State Department, that could even see funding for some initiatives increased. And if he were Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, Van Wetter said he would rather seize this moment to announce more development funding as a way for Europe “to take a different position from the U.S. and to reaffirm its values.” Update, Feb. 10, 2025: This article has been updated to clarify the year of Belgium’s aid donor rankings.