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This blog post was first published on the blog of the Center for Global Development.
“International aid” has long been considered shorthand for “development cooperation.” Development assistance from wealthier nations to low- and middle-income countries—important and lifesaving as some of these efforts are—was mistakenly taken to represent the entire sprawling, complex ecosystem of actors, institutions, ideas, and resources that determine sustainable economic and social development across significant portions of the world.
Today, there is resounding agreement that we need to rethink our approach to development cooperation. At stake is whether development can be understood from a fundamentally different starting point: the perspectives and priorities of countries themselves. Can cooperation be recast from a principal-agent mindset to one grounded in clarity and honesty among multiple actors with distinct expectations and incentives?
As Raj Kumar and others have noted, the hope is that 2026 will mark the beginning of a new era of development cooperation—one that genuinely encompasses countries at all stages of development and all sectors of society. The effort must be informed by today’s geopolitical realities but not captured by them, and guided by the global trends that are likely to endure so that we build a system for the next two decades and beyond.
Bob Marley was right. Understanding the past is essential to charting the future.
The number of countries offering development assistance has grown dynamically in the last 15 years. According to the World Bank, there were 26 bilateral donor countries in 2010; that number leapt to 43 in 2019, and to 49 today. That is a good thing. However, development efforts disproportionately focused on the perspective of this growing community of donors.
Donors—large and small alike—had incentives to maintain a prominent role in agenda-setting: direct engagement with senior political leaders carried diplomatic weight; OECD-led coordination mechanisms privileged provider perspectives; and donor-centered conferences reinforced this dynamic. At the same time, shifting domestic political cycles encouraged governments to prioritize visibility and attribution to taxpayers, sometimes at the expense of longer-term alignment with country-led strategies.
This donor-centric approach persists, even though official development assistance (ODA), totaling around $200 billion in 2024 (with preliminary estimates for 2025 at around $170 billion) represents less than 10 percent of total financing flowing to developing countries.
Emerging markets and developing countries have also, often unintentionally, reinforced a donor-centric approach by prioritizing increased aid over a shared agenda to address global economic reform or domestic constraints. Senior government officials spend enormous time managing fragmented reporting and coordination demands from dozens of donors and institutions, often at the expense of strategic planning and raising private capital. A World Bank study underscores this challenge, finding that 78 percent of developing countries work with more than 60 assistance agencies at once.
While ODA remains vital in some sectors and to a subset of vulnerable countries, chasing it at all costs has become a distraction from getting the broader development agenda right.
This incomplete and inefficient system of cooperation has largely endured for eight decades. Why?
There are perhaps two main reasons. First, despite the flaws of the existing global development system, its successes since 1945 have been profound.
Smallpox was eradicated, childhood vaccinations saved millions of lives, and literacy rates skyrocketed. Since 1950, global life expectancy has risen from roughly 47 years to more than 72 years today— an increase of about 25 years, reflecting advances in public health, disease prevention, and social development. The percentage of the world’s population living in extreme poverty fell from around 60 percent in 1960 to less than 10 percent today, largely driven by China. Countries once very poor became engines for growth and prosperity, including South Korea, Taiwan, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and much of Latin America. The precise role of development cooperation in these accomplishments is debated, but it clearly mattered.
Second, the system endured because it was embedded in a broader compact around economic development and growth. More advanced economies would provide less economically advanced countries with financial assistance and policy expertise to help them climb the ladder of economic development in a deeply interconnected global economic system. In exchange, developing countries would take part in the global system of trade and economic exchange without challenging its underpinnings—effectively accepting the “Washington Consensus” or some variation of it.
That consensus has increasingly unraveled. Conflicts in Syria and Ukraine displaced more than 12 million people and redirected significant aid toward humanitarian relief, including refugee support within donor countries themselves. Meanwhile, major refugee movements in places such as Colombia, Pakistan, Sudan, and Uganda received far less attention, even as low- and middle-income countries now host over 70 percent of the world’s refugees and internally displaced. These pressures strained development finance and exposed widening gaps in global responsibility-sharing.
The COVID-19 pandemic deepened economic divergence and mistrust, as wealthier countries mobilized vast resources for their own populations while poorer countries faced sharp contractions, rising poverty, and limited fiscal space. The IMF estimates that the global economy contracted by 3.3 percent in 2020, the worst peacetime contractions since the 1930s. Wealthier countries had the fiscal space to deal with this shock while close to 100 million people in low- and middle-income countries fell back into extreme poverty. Inflation spikes, debt distress, and post-pandemic political shifts further stalled or reversed development progress, while several major donors cut aid budgets at the same time for the first time in decades. By 2025, developing countries were paying more in debt service than they received in new financing, leaving dozens of low-income countries in or near debt distress and diverting resources away from health, education, and infrastructure.
Throughout this period, the actors have multiplied—from primarily bilateral and multilateral donors to include emerging economies (China, Gulf states, India), private foundations, impact investors, and an expanding role for the private sector. What began as a relatively straightforward transfer of resources from high-income to lower-income countries has evolved into a complex, multistakeholder system pursuing diverse and sometimes competing objectives.
“I love the mountains and hills of Rwanda; Rwanda is the Switzerland of Africa.” We have heard this from several European and American friends.
One day a Cameroonian friend said, “I love the mountains of Switzerland; Switzerland is the Rwanda of Europe.”
As uncertain and perilous as the current moment may be, it is also one of profound opportunity—to fundamentally rethink how development cooperation should and could work in the decades ahead. The number of efforts examining “the future of” some specific aspect of, or all of, development reflects a growing impatience with incremental change and a desire to chart a new course.
For us at the Future of Development Cooperation Coalition, one thing is clear: we need to turn the old system on its head so that countries are genuinely—not rhetorically— at the center of the new system. A change of perspective can be disorienting, strange, and liberating.
It is not yet clear where the landing zone will be.
Some breaks with the past are vital. They will shape our work to facilitate an inclusive process towards a modern, effective, efficient, and legitimate development cooperation system.
We have also identified core driving questions to work on with our co-chairs and commissioners and through our inclusive consultations:
What is the purpose of development cooperation? This seemingly simple question is critical to both prioritize work and build political support domestically and across different types of external partners, from governments to private actors. We will consider how development cooperation can:
Who sets the rules of the game? This question goes beyond issues of representation and voting shares in the multilateral system. It goes to the nature of global economic and financial systems and partnership models based on transparency and fair play. We will look at issues such as:
What are the sources of finance, how is financing best distributed, and what are the non-financial levers that matter? This question broadens the conversation from aid to foreground other flows with exponentially more volume and potential, as well as the non-financial drivers of progress. We will consider:
What delivery models increase impact, effectiveness, efficiency, and scale? This question gets to the important “how” of development cooperation—where approaches diverge across countries and sectors, and where many investors remain baffled about how to work with multilateral development banks and development finance institutions. This includes thinking about:
What do you think are the most urgent questions the development system needs to confront—and where are the biggest opportunities to rethink how cooperation works in the decades ahead? Watch this space for more from the Coalition on these questions in the weeks ahead.
The authors thank Radha Rajkotia and Jeanette Thomas for their valuable contributions.