Spain bucks Europe's aid trend, but journey is just beginning

As major European Union donors such as Germany, France, and Denmark pull back on foreign aid, Spain is trying to buck the trend by setting an ambitious goal to spend 0.7% of gross national income on aid — a dramatic jump from the country’s current level of 0.24%. But Antón Leis García, director of Spanish development agency AECID, admits that just getting to 0.4% or 0.5%, a target reached by many of the model countries they’ve been studying, would be a step in the right direction for Spain. “In 2021, we had a budget when I took over of €360 million and last year, it was 708 million euros,” Leis said, noting that with its development financing arm, AECID manages a portfolio of about €1 billion. “It’s still small … we need to continue growing, but that’s a good testimony of the commitment to growth.” “But that’s not enough,” he added, pointing out that while official development assistance worldwide amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars a year, trillions are needed to achieve the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. “Do the math. Without financial markets and without engaging the private sector, we will simply not address this gap,” he told Devex on the sidelines of last week’s World Bank-International Monetary Fund Spring Meetings. That’s why partnering with the private sector is one of AECID’s priorities under a new law meant to modernize and reform the country’s aid system, he explained. That law — passed on a bipartisan basis — is now gradually being implemented after being delayed by months of political turmoil. “We, as an agency, we are quite unique in that we cover humanitarian aid, development cooperation, and also we have a financial lending arm. So we are throwing everything we have at these overlapping crises,” Leis said. Key to tackling these crises is breaking down silos in what has traditionally been Spain’s fragmented, inefficient aid system. “One example, investing in rural women,” Leis told Devex, saying that it not only strengthens gender equality — especially important because Spain’s new aid law champions a feminist foreign policy — but also addresses food security and climate adaptation on the ground, where women farmers are often on the front line. Leis said that providing aid to middle-income countries — atypical for many donor agencies — is also an integral piece of today’s “polycrisis” jigsaw puzzle. He said AECID still wants to increase its engagement with the group of least developed countries, particularly those in the Sahel of Africa. “But what makes us unique is that … about 50% of what we do is in Latin America and the Caribbean, a region that most donors have abandoned. Yet it is a region that has challenges. We’ve seen in the pandemic, it was the hardest hit region because it had a demographic pyramid similar to Europe, but not the social protection and health systems that we have,” Leis said. “So in this world where we are transforming aid into partnership, there is no single global issue that we can tackle alone — migration, climate, gender equality — we cannot do it without some of these middle-income countries.” Working with middle-income countries, many of which have similar agendas to that of Spain, also means that the lines between donor and recipient are “blurred,” which Leis believes is a good thing because it forges a more equitable partnership. It also shows that engagement is more of an investment than a handout, which can positively shift the public narrative about foreign aid. “This is no longer about a vertical [global] north-south relationship,” he said. “Partly because we have this tradition of working with middle-income countries, we take pride in being a listening donor. And we think that is the best recipe to tackle the distrust that we have on many global [issues].”