Global development leaders convened in Nairobi on June 22–23, 2026, for a two-day conference titled Transforming International Development Cooperation: Markets, Interests and Partnerships in a Changing Global Order, held at the Nairobi Serena Hotel and facilitated by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom. EnviroNews
Participants included policymakers, economists, development practitioners, private-sector leaders, civil society representatives and international partners from both the Global South and Global North. Senior figures present included H.E. Zainab Hawa Bangura, Director-General of the United Nations Office Nairobi, and Ahmed Abdisalan, Principal Secretary of Kenya’s State Department for National Government Coordination.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
The conference arrives as the global aid architecture records its worst structural deterioration in decades. Total global aid fell by 23.1% in real terms during 2025 the most severe single-year contraction ever recorded. The OECD describes the drop as “a major shock” to the development cooperation system, with 26 of 34 OECD members shrinking their budgets, including the five largest providers France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Total aid stood at US$163 billion in 2025, down from $232 billion in 2023, returning global aid spending to near-2015 levels. The OECD projects the contraction will continue, with an estimated cut of between one-fifth and one-third of current ODA resources through 2026 and beyond. EnviroNews
IMPLICATIONS
Aid budgets are shrinking across donor countries while debt servicing costs are rising across developing economies, and progress toward several Sustainable Development Goals remains off track. Aid-funded programs in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia are already being scaled back or shut down. Health systems are straining under climate shocks, food price volatility, and conflict — precisely as international support becomes less predictable.
The 61 countries classified by the OECD as experiencing extreme or high fragility account for just one-quarter of global population but contain 72% of people living in extreme poverty the demographic cohort most directly exposed to the current aid collapse. Humanitarian assistance from DAC countries fell by 35.8% compared to 2024, representing the sharpest sectoral squeeze within an already contracting aid envelope. The Gulf exception remains marginal: Qatar and the UAE boosted ODA by 23.4% and 55.5% respectively, though the UAE’s rise is heavily concentrated in humanitarian response to Palestine.
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BACKGROUND STORY
The Nairobi conference is one of several overlapping multilateral responses to a structural breakdown that has been building for years. The convergence of budget decisions by governments of markedly different political persuasions suggests a common climate of distrust and scepticism toward international aid beyond the stated fiscal motives of individual donors.
Western economies that historically anchored the aid system accounted for nearly half of global GDP in 1990 in PPP terms; by 2023, their share had fallen to one-third, while emerging market economies rose from 28% to 45%. That shift has steadily eroded the geopolitical logic that once sustained donor commitments.
The United States alone accounted for three-quarters of the overall 2025 drop, slashing its aid budget by nearly 57%. The US FY2026 budget proposal includes a two-thirds reduction in bilateral global health programmes, a 50% cut for HIV/AIDS funding, no allocations to the Global Fund or Gavi, and a 75% cut in Millennium Challenge Corporation funding affecting 51 developing countries. In 2025, Germany became the world’s largest aid donor for the first time not through increased generosity, but because US withdrawal was so steep that Germany’s own reduced budget temporarily put it at the top.
INSIGHT
The Nairobi conference represents a forced pivot, not a voluntary evolution. The post-war, post-colonial architecture of international aid is not merely cracking in many places it has already collapsed. The “benevolent donor” model is running out of money just as it runs out of moral capital.
A central theme of the conference is the transition from aid dependency to partnership-based cooperation reframing development as strategic partnership promoting shared prosperity rather than charity. The problem is that this reframing is being driven by donor retreat, not by a genuine redistribution of agency to recipient countries.
Donor agencies facing domestic budget cuts are chasing visibility by funding short-term, flag-waving projects to justify their existence to taxpayers. The shift toward trade, investment, and private-sector engagement as replacements for aid flows carries the risk of repackaging conditionality rather than eliminating it and of directing development finance toward commercially viable economies while abandoning the most fragile states.
As stated in the G7 ministerial meeting in April 2026, “public resources alone are insufficient to meet global development needs.” That admission, made by the same governments now cutting those public resources, defines the central contradiction the Nairobi conference and every subsequent forum will struggle to resolve.
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