foreign aid

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Refugees at a UNICEF-supported “tent school” in Hargeysa, Somalia.

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foreign aid, the international transfer of capital, goods, or services from a country or international organization for the benefit of the recipient country or its population. Aid can be economic, military, or emergency humanitarian (e.g., aid given following natural disasters).

Foreign aid can involve a transfer of financial resources or commodities (e.g., food or military equipment) or technical advice and training. The resources can take the form of grants or concessional credits (e.g., export credits). The most common type of foreign aid is official development assistance (ODA), which is assistance given to promote development and to combat poverty. The primary source of ODA—which for some countries represents only a small portion of their assistance—is bilateral grants from one country to another, though some of the aid is in the form of loans, and sometimes the aid is channeled through international organizations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). For example, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) have provided significant amounts of aid to countries and to NGOs involved in assistance activities.

Countries often provide foreign aid to enhance their own security. Thus, economic assistance may be used to prevent friendly governments from falling under the influence of unfriendly ones or as payment for the right to establish or use military bases on foreign soil. Foreign aid also may be used to achieve a country’s diplomatic goals, enabling it to gain diplomatic recognition, to garner support for its positions in international organizations, or to increase its diplomats’ access to foreign officials. Other purposes of foreign aid include promoting a country’s exports (e.g., through programs that require the recipient country to use the aid to purchase the donor country’s agricultural products or manufactured goods) and spreading its language, culture, or religion. Countries also provide aid to relieve suffering caused by natural or man-made disasters such as famine, disease, and war, to promote economic development, to help establish or strengthen political institutions, and to address a variety of transnational problems including disease, terrorism and other crimes, and destruction of the environment. Because most foreign aid programs are designed to serve several of these purposes simultaneously, it is difficult to identify any one of them as most important.

The earliest form of foreign aid was military assistance designed to help warring parties that were in some way considered strategically important. Its use in the modern era began in the 18th century, when Prussia subsidized some of its allies. European powers in the 19th and 20th centuries provided large amounts of money to their colonies, typically to improve infrastructure with the ultimate goal of increasing the colony’s economic output. The structure and scope of foreign aid today can be traced to two major developments following World War II: (1) the implementation of the Marshall Plan, a U.S.-sponsored package to rehabilitate the economies of 17 western and southern European countries, and (2) the founding of significant international organizations, including the United Nations, IMF, and World Bank. These international organizations have played a major role in allocating international funds, determining the qualifications for the receipt of aid, and assessing the impact of foreign aid. Contemporary foreign aid is distinguished not only because it is sometimes humanitarian (with little or no self-interest by the donor country) but also by its size, amounting to trillions of dollars since the end of World War II, by the large number of governments providing it, and by the transparent nature of the transfers.

The level of foreign aid expenditures following World War II dwarfed prewar assistance. The postwar programs of the United Kingdom, France, and other European former colonial powers grew out of the assistance they had provided to their colonial possessions. More importantly, however, the United States and Soviet Union and their allies during the Cold War used foreign aid as a diplomatic tool to foster political alliances and strategic advantages; it was withheld to punish states that seemed too close to the other side. In addition to the Marshall Plan, in 1947 the United States provided assistance to Greece and Turkey to help those countries resist the spread of communism, and, following the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1953, communist-bloc countries donated increasing amounts of foreign aid to less-developed countries and to close allies as a means of gaining influence as well as promoting economic development.

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Red Cross workers in Seoul preparing aid supply kits to be sent to North Korea after two trains carrying explosives and fuel collided in Ryongch’ŏn, North Korea, April 2004.

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Several non-European governments also implemented their own aid programs after World War II. For example, Japan developed an extensive foreign aid program—an outgrowth of its reparations payments made following the war—that provided assistance primarily to Asian countries. Much of Japan’s aid came through procurement from Japanese companies, which helped fuel economic development in Japan. By the late 20th century, Japan had become one of the world’s two leading donor countries, and its aid programs had extended to non-Asian countries, though much of the country’s assistance was still directed toward Asia.

The vast majority of ODA comes from the countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), specifically the nearly two dozen countries that make up the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC). The DAC includes western European countries, the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. Other providers of significant assistance include Brazil, China, Iceland, India, Kuwait, Poland, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. In the 1970s the international community, through the United Nations, set 0.7 percent of a country’s gross national income (GNI) as the benchmark for foreign aid. However, only a small number of countries (Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden) reached that mark. Although the United States and Japan have been the world’s two largest donors, their levels of foreign aid have fallen significantly short of the UN’s goal.

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has furnished foreign aid as part of peacemaking or peacekeeping initiatives in the Balkans, Northern Ireland, and parts of Africa. Foreign aid also has been used to promote smooth transitions to democracy and capitalism in former communist countries, most notably Russia.

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A Kenyan herdsman watering his goats at a trough that was constructed by Oxfam International.

Oxfam East Africa

Foreign assistance is still used to promote economic development. Although significant development occurred in much of Asia and Latin America during the second half of the 20th century, many countries in Africa remained severely underdeveloped despite receiving relatively large amounts of foreign aid for long periods. Beginning in the late 20th century, humanitarian assistance to African countries was provided in increasing amounts to alleviate suffering from natural disasters, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and destructive civil wars. Major initiatives to combat HIV/AIDS focused on the hardest-hit countries, most of which are in sub-Saharan Africa.

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A child receiving a UNICEF-funded tuberculosis vaccine at a school in Bulacan province, Philippines, c. 1952.

© UNICEF/ICEF-2539

Foreign aid has been used, particularly in poorer countries, to fund or to monitor elections, to facilitate judicial reforms, and to assist the activities of human rights organizations and labour groups. In the post-Cold War era, when funding anticommunist governments became a less important criteria for the United States and its allies, promoting democracy was elevated as a criterion in foreign aid programs. Aid was provided to some countries as an incentive for initiating democratic reforms and was withheld from others as a punishment for resisting such reforms.

Foreign aid is also used to address transnational problems such as the production and export of illegal drugs and the battle against HIV/AIDS. For example, the International Narcotics Control program allocates U.S. funds to countries to battle drug production, and the Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988 make foreign aid and access to U.S. markets conditional upon recipient countries’ actively combatting drug production and trafficking.

Since the 1990s many foreign aid sources, notably the IMF, have made aid conditional on market-oriented economic reforms, such as lowering trade barriers and privatization. Thus, foreign aid has been used as a tool by some institutions and countries to encourage the spread of capitalism.

In the last decade of the 20th century, private capital flows and remittances from migrant workers became the two largest sources of “aid” from wealthy countries to poor ones, surpassing the amount of ODA provided by those countries. However, this form of aid is heavily stratified; most direct foreign investment has gone to developing countries pursuing policies of trade and economic liberalization and those with large markets (e.g., Brazil, China, and India).

By the early 21st century, China had become a major provider of foreign aid, especially in Africa. Notably, beginning in 2013, China offered infrastructure loans to a large number of countries in East Asia, Africa, and South America as part of its massive Belt and Road Initiative.