How much do southern European donors spend on development aid?

In the past few years, Devex has explored lesser-known sources of development and humanitarian aid, including the Low Countries and other emerging donors, such as the BRICS bloc. In this article, we’ve turned our attention to southern Europe, which consists of a mix of emerging and long-standing donors: Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, which are all Development Assistance Committee member countries; Croatia, a participant; and Malta, a non-DAC member. While their total development spending represents just a fraction of what the U.S., the largest donor, has disbursed, these donors have gradually increased their aid in the past few years, showing potential for being significant players in the development realm in the future. We used the OECD data to look into the geographical and sectoral priorities of these donors. All figures are in 2022 U.S. dollar prices. Devex will be publishing a longer version of this report in the coming weeks. We will update this article when the full report becomes available. Overall figures Altogether, the six donors disbursed $12 billion for development and humanitarian activities in 2022. This represents a 22% real-term increase from 2021. In recent times, Malta has seen the biggest jump in spending among the six donors. From $34 million in 2018, the country’s foreign assistance grew to $60 million in 2022, or an 88.2% increase. Croatia ranked next, with a 72% hike in the five-year period. Then Spain, with 25.1%; Portugal, with 17.4%; Italy, with 13.5%; and Greece, with 6%. 🇭🇷 Croatia Croatia started its aid activity in 2011, focusing on technical assistance and other nonfinancial aid. The country’s Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs oversees its foreign cooperation. Based on OECD data, from $82 million in 2018, Croatia’s aid spending took a slight dip before the pandemic, reaching $76 million in 2019, then $79 million the following year. It rose to $85 million in 2021, then jumped to $138 million in 2022. Over 70% of its aid from 2018 to 2021 was channeled through multilaterals. However, that figure dipped to 46.4% in 2022. 🇬🇷 Greece A series of financial crises and recession have contributed to Greece’s struggles to meet the target to spend 0.7% of gross national income on official development assistance. Based on OECD data, Greece’s ODA was increasing pre-pandemic — from $283 million in 2018 to $376 million in 2019. It went down to $330 million the following year and then to $326 million in 2021 but quickly recovered to $360 million in 2022. The largest chunk of Greece’s aid in the period went through the multilateral system, reaching as high as 86.6% in 2018. 🇮🇹 Italy For the past five years, Italy has shown an upward trend when it comes to its aid funding. According to the data from OECD, Italy started with $4.9 billion in 2018, which then gradually went up to $6.6 billion in 2022. Then in the 2023 preliminary report of OECD, the amount dipped slightly to $5.6 billion. Though the country has given a significant amount of aid in the past few years, its ODA-to-gross-national-income ratio tells a different story. The country’s average ODA-to-GNI ratio is only at 0.26%, peaking at 0.33% in 2022 — far below the 0.7% goal set for DAC member countries. 🇲🇹 Malta Malta’s aid spending was consistently increasing in the five-year period, with just a slight dip in 2021. From $34 million in 2018, it nearly doubled its aid in 2022, reaching $60 million. Most of its aid was spent bilaterally, reaching as high as 94% in 2021. About 61.5% of Malta’s aid in 2022, worth $36.9 million, went to multiple countries from different regions. 🇵🇹 Portugal Portugal’s main cooperation agency is Camões — Instituto da Cooperação e da Lingua, which implements Portuguese cooperation policy and education and dissemination policies related to the Portuguese language and culture. Portugal showed a consistent trend in its aid disbursements, ranging from $407 million to $523 million from 2018-2022. In 2023, its ODA dropped to $478 million. Its ODA-to-GNI ratio is relatively low as well, only ranging from 0.13% to 0.21% at most. In 2023, the ratio was 0.19%, making Portugal the DAC donor with the fifth-lowest ODA-to-GNI ratio. 🇪🇸 Spain Spanish aid has slowly risen in the past five years. It started with $2.8 billion in 2018 and rose to $4.3 billion in 2022. According to preliminary data from OECD, Spanish aid in 2023 dropped a little to $3.5 billion. The same could be said about its ODA-to-GNI ratio. Its ratio increased from 0.20% in 2018 to 0.30% in 2022, but fell below Italy slightly in 2023, with 0.24. Spain’s main aid agency is the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation, or AECID. Try out Devex Pro Funding today with a free five-day trial, and explore funding opportunities from over 850 sources in addition to our analysis and news content.