If foreign aid appeared to have one friend at the top table of international politics in recent years, it was France.
So civil society reacted with dismay in recent weeks, when two pieces of news fell within a few weeks.
First, economy minister Bruno Le Maire announced in February a €742 million, or 13%, cut to France’s official development assistance for 2024 amid a revised growth forecast. Other areas of government spending were cut too. But in an open letter in Le Monde, nongovernmental organizations called the aid cuts a backward step by President Emmanuel Macron after he had championed the importance of ODA to other world leaders at a summit in Paris in June 2023, and passed a new law in 2021 to progressively raise France’s aid budget as a proportion of gross national income.