If you were to draw a circle on a map, 4,000 kilometers across, centered around the point where the border between Vietnam and China meets the sea, you’d find that more people live inside the circle than outside.
This edition of Money Matters is focused firmly on that region of the planet, with a look at both aid from China, and aid to East and Southeast Asia.
Also in today’s edition: The latest from the G20, a look at the Innovation Foundation, and a surprise morsel of good news on U.S. aid funding.
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There’s a well-worn narrative that as the United States steps back from international development, China will fill the vacuum left behind. And while it’s not entirely clear yet that this is true, it does appear that China was steadily boosting aid spending, even before the recent U.S. decision to step away from many aspects of aid.
AidData, a research institute that provides a comprehensive mapping of China’s international financial activities, looked at well over $1 trillion of spending, up to 2021. It found that in 2018, Chinese aid — that is, spending which would likely count as official development assistance, or ODA, if China were using the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development rules — peaked at more than $12 billion.
There is a major caveat here. It’s not absolutely clear how much of that was grants, and how much was loans. Given that the two are extremely difficult to compare accurately, the Chinese aid budget might be rather less impressive than it first appears.
Still, that’s only ODA spending. China’s famous Belt and Road initiative also provided ten times as much funding that couldn’t be classified as aid, but would be counted under the more nebulous category of “other official flows.”
Read: Is China headed to becoming the next aid superpower? (Pro)
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The Asian Development Bank has approved a $56.4 million program to enhance disaster response capacity in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
The World Bank has approved a $100 million loan to improve efficient land administration in Colombia.
The government of South Korea has contributed $2.9 million in aid to support refugees and school children by providing food assistance in Uganda.
German aid funder BMZ is inviting qualified firms to provide advisory support for strengthening municipal governance in Mauritania.
The Japan International Cooperation Agency is seeking consultancy services to strengthen road networks in the Philippines.
The United Nations is launching a call for proposals to empower persons with disabilities by providing economic opportunities in Syria.
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Overall, there is a significant amount of aid flowing to what the OECD terms the “Far East Asia” region — more than $40 billion over a five-year period. The biggest recipients of aid are Indonesia and the Philippines, and the largest donor is Japan.
As with our other regional analyses, my colleague Alecsondra Kieren Si has broken down all the details, and looked at what would happen to aid in the region if the United States were to pull its support.
Read: How much aid goes to East and Southeast Asia? (Pro)
The United States did not attend the Group of 20 largest economies’ summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, this weekend, and in its absence, the remaining members of the group have put together a declaration that doesn’t look likely to go down especially well in Washington.
There are mixed feelings about how much was achieved at the summit, with aspects of the declaration viewed as weak on subjects such as debt. But there was also optimism that it was published at all, in the face of U.S. opposition, and that it focuses on issues such as debt, climate change, and sustainable development.
Read: G20 summit in South Africa adopts declaration without the US
Some surprising good news from the United States — after a fashion. It’s pledged $4.6 billion to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which has raised more than $11 billion from its latest funding round.
That’s down considerably on the last pledge, of $6 billion, three years ago, but given the parsimonious approach taken to all other aid by the Trump administration, everyone is considering that a win.
The U.S. isn’t the only major donor to cut funding, however, so the Global Fund is looking at a considerably smaller budget for the next few years.
Read: Global Fund raised $11.34 billion with a surprising US pledge
Elsewhere, though, the United States’ battle with philanthropy seems to show no signs of abating. The latest charge is that top development funders are in some way in cahoots with the Chinese Communist Party.
Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he is probing the Gates Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Rockefeller Brothers Fund to determine if their funding of programs in China violated nonprofit tax rules, my colleague Adva Saldinger reports.
Grassley wrote formal letters to the three organizations last month asking them to confirm that their funding followed the law.
Read: Sen. Grassley probes top foundations’ China funding, nonprofit status
If you’re going to call yourself the Innovation Foundation, you better be doing something different. And indeed, that’s what the corporate philanthropy by that name is trying to do. Not least because it’s the corporate foundation of the Adecco Group but hasn’t taken the name of its parent company.
Last week, Devex contributor Christine Sow, who’s heading up a series of interviews with foundation leaders, sat down with Innovation Foundation Managing Director Cynthia Hansen to find out what makes the foundation tick.
Read: Is the Innovation Foundation a new model of corporate philanthropy? (Pro)
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