The year in data: 10 numbers that defined development in 2024

Once again, the aid sector has faced a difficult year, marked by aid cuts across Europe and growing concern about debts, and capped by worries about the return of Donald Trump. On the other hand, the humanitarian environment has improved slightly, after a decade of steadily getting worse. But the situation remains dire. We’ve pulled out 10 numbers that help define what happened this year. 1. €2 billion — the amount the EU has cut development spending While aid cuts remain a threat in the United States, they are already a reality in Europe. The EU has made the most headlines with its plan to divert cash away from least-developed countries, as part of a $2 billion reduction in its aid budget. But plenty of its member states are getting in on the act. Since the United Kingdom cut its aid budgets, Germany has been the most generous donor in the Group of Seven major economies — and indeed the G20. But it has also shaved several billion off future spending. And other countries, including France, Sweden, and the Netherlands have made cuts as well. 2. $8.8 trillion — the total debt owed by low- and middle-income countries The global south is facing a huge debt crisis — arguably worse than the one that led the Paris Club of wealthy nations to the table in the 1990s. The development impacts are obvious — right now, almost half the world spends more on servicing debt than on health and education. Total debt servicing costs for low- and middle-income countries totaled $1.4 trillion last year, according to the World Bank. The crisis is largely not of the global south’s making. Countries were forced to borrow to get through the COVID-19 pandemic but at manageable interest rates. Then the war in Ukraine pushed up food and fuel prices, which led to a spike in inflation, which in turn forced central banks worldwide to raise interest rates. The chief economist of the World Bank, Indermit Gill, offered a savage critique of the debt situation in his introduction to the International Debt Report 2024. “The risk-reward balance cannot be allowed to remain as lopsided as it is today, with multilateral institutions and government creditors bearing nearly all the risk and private creditors reaping nearly all the rewards,” he wrote. Gill attacked the bank’s “billions to trillions” target — which aims to attract private capital into emerging markets — saying it was “a fantasy” and that in fact, the private sector was extracting more in interest than it was taking in new lending. 3. 40% — the amount USAID’s budget should be cut, according to Project 2025 Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. election has upended the development sector. Since that point, leaders have been focused on his still-unannounced choice to lead USAID. Republican thinkers at the Heritage Foundation, in their Project 2025 document, outlined what they felt Trump should do in the early days of his presidency. Although Trump has disavowed the project, many still see it as a good reflection of what his administration will choose to do, with several people in the aid sector tipping the lead author of the report’s chapter on USAID, Max Primorac, to have a prominent role, maybe even as administrator. His recommendation for USAID: “The next conservative Administration should scale back USAID’s global footprint by, at a minimum, returning to the agency’s 2019 pre-COVID-19 pandemic budget level.” It’s not clear whether that revised budget was intended to be inflation-adjusted. If not, his projection would take the agency down from $44.2 billion to $26.6 billion — a drop of about 40%. If so, the cut would only be down to $32.8 billion — more like 26%. For those concerned about the size of a potential cut, it’s worth remembering that aid has historically had bipartisan support in Congress, which holds the purse strings — and that spending actually increased during the first Trump administration. 4. 283 — Aid worker deaths in 2024 With less than two weeks still to go in 2024, the year is already the most deadly on record for the aid community, according to figures recorded on the Aid Worker Security Database. Of those deaths, 178 were in the occupied Palestinian territories — around 63% of all fatalities. Of those, the vast majority were in Gaza. The previous most deadly year for aid workers was last year, 2023, which saw 280 deaths, including 163 in Palestine. 5. $300 billion — the amount of climate finance to be provided annually by 2035 COP29 in Azerbaijan was all about climate finance and, eventually, at some point well past the eleventh hour, countries came to an agreement on the New Collective Quantified Goal — the target amount of cash that richer countries would contribute per year. It sounds like a lot of money when you look at the headline figure: $300 billion a year for climate. However the global south was incredibly unhappy with the agreement because it does not specify, for example, which countries will contribute what, how much will come from state donors versus the private sector, or whether funding will be in grants or loans. And once inflation is taken into account, the new goal is a relatively small increase on the $100 billion that was due to be delivered by 2020 — a target that was only met years late, if at all. 6. Over 700 million — the number of people going hungry Up to 757 million people may have faced hunger, according to a United Nations report published earlier this year. Meanwhile, up to 2.33 billion people — 29% of the world’s population — faced at least moderate levels of food insecurity. As with many development issues, the rise in hunger dates back to the COVID-19 pandemic. Until that point, levels of hunger were slowly decreasing, but now around 150 million more people are hungry than in 2019. 7. 39.9 million — the number of people living with HIV The past decade has seen a steady decline in the number of people acquiring HIV, and in 2023 the figure dropped to 1.3 million. And of the people living with HIV, 73% have suppressed viral loads, meaning they are unlikely to pass the virus on. So on the one hand, progress is being made. On the other, it remains well below target levels; by 2025, the figure is supposed to have fallen to 350,000 a year. The other concern is around funding. With HIV levels falling, how long can governments be persuaded to put money into the battle? In the global south, preparations are already underway for a world in which international funds will not be directed to HIV. “We know that the time will come when the donor resources will dwindle,” Lloyd Mulenga, the director of infectious diseases in Zambia’s Ministry of Health, told Devex earlier this year. 8. $49.6 billion — the amount of humanitarian aid needed this year The level of humanitarian aid needed peaked in 2023, according to statistics from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Like many other key statistics in aid, need began to rise in 2020, during the pandemic, essentially doubling between 2019 and 2023. Projections for 2025 suggest that aid needs may be lower again next year, and if this is indeed the case, it could be a welcome break for a beleaguered and overstretched sector. While aid needed this year was $49.6 billion, far less than that was actually contributed. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, $22.1 billion was contributed through U.N. coordinated plans, while another $9.2 billion was provided outside them. OCHA has never received all the money it asks for, but while in pre-pandemic years, its plans would typically be around 60% funded, that figure has now fallen to around 45%. 9. $23.7 billion — the amount committed during the IDA replenishment The World Bank’s International Development Association provides grants and low-interest loans to 78 low-income countries. Every three years, donors commit to replenishment of the fund, and much was made of the need for this replenishment, in the words of bank president Ajay Banga, to be “the largest of all time.” In the end, he got his wish. Just. Donors committed around $200 million more than last time, making this replenishment the largest in cash terms. The bank has said it can use the money to issue bonds and raise more money on international capital markets, taking the total size of the fund to around $100 million. But truth be told, once inflation and economic growth are factored in, this looks like a less generous settlement than last time. 10. 2% — the amount that Brazil thinks we should tax billionaires Fair taxation isn’t as big a deal as debt in the world of development, but it’s still huge. The global south is said to lose $47 billion a year to tax abuse. Earlier this year, a resolution to promote “inclusive and effective international tax cooperation at the United Nations” set in motion a push for the global south to wrest control of tax from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the G20, and move it to the U.N. where southern nations can have a say. Meanwhile, at the G20 meeting in November, Brazil proposed a 2% tax on the assets of billionaires worldwide, following proposals by French economist Gabriel Zucman. By the time the declaration was agreed, leaders agreed only that going forward, the G20 nations would “engage cooperatively to ensure ultra-high-net-worth individuals are effectively taxed.” But even this was seen as a win by tax justice campaigners.