Who will be the winners and losers of global development funding in 2025? Going down are traditional government aid departments — such as USAID, which is likely to see significant cuts under the incoming Trump administration, according to Devex President Raj Kumar, who offered his predictions to Devex Pro members at a briefing last week. It’s not just the U.S. though — we’ve already seen budget cuts among donors across Europe, including the U.K., France, and Germany. U.N. agencies are also likely to suffer, Kumar predicted.
But the winners might be multilateral development banks and development finance institutions, in part because it’s easier to make a geopolitical case for them and to build bipartisan support for investment in the private sector, Kumar said.