9. Estimates of official development assistance funding for COVID-19 response in 2020
In their responses to the COVID-19 crisis, many development co-operation actors reallocated budgets and pledged new funding to support developing countries. This chapter provides preliminary estimates of funds allocated and discusses the outlook for funding in 2021 and beyond. It argues for better tracking and more transparency to make the most of increasingly limited resources.
Total funding commitments and disbursements by providers of development co-operation for COVID-19 have been difficult to track and determine. Initial and partial estimates from an OECD survey suggest that Development Assistance Committee (DAC) members mobilised USD 12 billion for COVID-19 support to developing countries.
Comprehensive, real-time tools for tracking pledges, disbursements and allocations would increase funding transparency and help identify where official development assistance could best fill gaps in a crisis and in normal times.
Shifts in funding allocations to health and humanitarian assistance from other sectors could hamper a comprehensive multi-sector approach to addressing COVID-19 and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. It will be important to find the right balance between resources for crisis response and longer term investments in sustainable development.
Looking ahead, there are signs that a funding crisis is on the horizon. Many DAC members indicated they would protect official development assistance (ODA) budgets and some plan to increase ODA budgets for 2021. Yet, given the global economic impacts of the pandemic, it is not certain that ODA volumes can rise or even hold steady over the coming years.
As the COVID-19 crisis evolved, development co-operation actors optimised flexibility and adapted their funding and budgets. This chapter draws on interviews with DAC members, a recent survey conducted by the OECD1 on financing for COVID-19 response and other literature.
Though many new initiatives and co-ordinated actions emerged to respond to COVID-19, calculating the total international response to COVID-19 in developing countries has proven challenging, raising more questions at the end of 2020 than answers. Questions range from how much was committed and then disbursed, to how much funding was extrabudgetary, and how much was reallocated from existing programmes, and at what cost? It also remains to be seen how much international development finance for COVID-19 will be counted as ODA. On this last point, the OECD (2020[1]) published an initial indication of ODA eligibility in July 2020. The DAC Working Party on Development Finance Statistics also approved two tools to track COVID-19-related expenses in the health sector and other sectors.
By any estimate, demand far outstrips funding. African governments are calling for significantly more support (Ofori-Atta, 2020[2]). Based on International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates, the gap in finance available to help developing countries deal with the fallout of COVID-19 could be as much as USD 2 trillion (Kharas and Dooley, 2020[3]). For humanitarian needs alone, the overall global funding gap was USD 24 billion at the beginning of November. Humanitarian appeals are the highest on record – a total of USD 39 billion, of which USD 9.5 billion is specifically for COVID-19 through the Global Humanitarian Response Plan (UN OCHA, 2020[4]). At the same time, OECD governments mobilised stimulus packages that account for 84% of total world stimulus packages, or a total of USD 9.9 trillion as of September 2020 based on IMF (2020[5]) data.2
Estimates of development finance for COVID-19 are presented in Table 9.1. The figures, which are preliminary and partial, are drawn from a survey conducted by the OECD in October 2020.
Key funding trends and findings from the OECD survey and interviews with DAC members on funding are:
Seventeen DAC member countries indicated that they had provided new or additional funding to 2020 budget envelopes, amounting to about USD 7 billion to be spent in 2020 and thereafter. Germany (Box 9.1) and the United States (USD 1.1 billion; See Box 4.1 in Chapter 4) account for a high share of the total.
An estimated USD 4.8 billion of DAC member’s commitments have been re-programmed towards COVID-19 response in 2020, some of which through redirecting resources from development programmes that were delayed or stalled due to the crisis, for example scholarships and training or volunteer programmes.
Development actors adapted many existing programmes so that they could continue to deliver in a COVID-19 context or address altered contexts and needs. Most DAC members indicated that they have not discontinued ongoing development programmes.
Providers are focusing on countries most affected or at risk, low-income countries and fragile regions, and their priority countries. For example, the World Bank responded that USD 25 billion of the USD 43 billion it had committed by September 2020 went to IDA-eligible countries, i.e. the 74 mainly low-income countries that are eligible to borrow at concessional rates from the International Development Association (IDA). Fragile and conflict-affected economies received USD 7.6 billion of the total (World Bank, 2020[8]).
The Arab Coordination Group, the second-largest grouping of development co-operation providers after the DAC, committed to allocate USD 10 billion to support developing countries in their immediate response and recovery efforts, including through provision of medical supplies and protective equipment, and to provide further financial assistance for agriculture, food security, energy, education, and micro and small and medium-sized enterprises. One member, Saudi Arabia, pledged USD 500 million to support partner countries in mitigating the impacts of the crisis, extending its partnerships with the World Health Organization, the World Food Programme and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance and is using its Group of 20 (G20) chairmanship in 2020 to support international co-ordination of the COVID-19 economic response. Another member, Kuwait, postponed to 2021 debt repayments from countries on the IDA eligibility list that were due between 1 May and 31 December 2020.4
Germany increased its official development assistance (ODA) budget in response to COVID-19. The government reallocated EUR 1.15 billion of the 2020 ODA budget towards the response by April 2020 and in June announced an additional EUR 3 billion in ODA through to 2021 as part of the country’s fiscal stimulus package (BMZ, 2020[9]). EUR 1.55 billion of this was made available in July from the supplementary budget and a further EUR 1.55 billion is foreseen, subject to approval by the German parliament.
In the first weeks of the pandemic, the Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) recognised that COVID-19 would require a reallocation of funding. Between March and April, shortly after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, the BMZ restructured programmes to provide more emergency relief and services for displaced people and to strengthen crisis management, reallocating EUR 1.15 billion of the 2020 ODA budget to address the health and economic impacts of the crisis in developing countries. With the trajectory of the virus changing rapidly, rather than assessing needs geographically, BMZ identified seven pressing thematic priorities that cut across partner countries. These encompassed health sector support and pandemic control as well as secondary impacts such as food security, stabilisation of fragile regions affected by displacement, social protection and securing jobs in global supply chains, liquidity for partner country governments in the form of sector budget support, and international co-operation efforts including Germany’s engagement with the World Bank and the United Nations.
While the scale of needs arising from the pandemic and the need for additional resources were evident, BMZ decided to reallocate a share of the current budget before making the case to the parliament for additional ODA. This strategy had three key strengths. First, in the initial weeks of the pandemic, Germany’s partners had limited absorptive capacity to implement additional funds. Taking time to identify what was possible within the existing programme and what additional resources were required gave partners time to adjust. Second, in March, political bandwidth in Germany, as elsewhere in Europe, was focused on the crisis at home. When Germany’s development minister took the reallocation plan to the parliament in mid-April, Germany’s own fiscal package was already on the table. Comparing the scale of investment in Europe with the resources available to developing countries and making the case for global solidarity – i.e. sharing a portion of Germany’s stimulus package with populations most in need – proved to be a compelling narrative that gained political and public support. Third, by taking time to do what was possible within the existing budget, Germany was able to make the best use of its existing capacities and strengths while also identifying how and where additional resources were needed most.
At a time of intense pressure on government budgets, strong political will – backed by strategic, well-timed planning from within the ministry – enabled Germany to respond at scale. As a result, Germany stands out for having backed up its commitments to supporting developing countries in a time of crisis.
Source: Krake, M. (2020[10]), “The outlook for ODA budgets amidst the COVID-19 crisis”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xIQ5A2DpxU.
Development agencies balanced two competing demands in 2020: responding to the impacts of COVID-19 and ensuring that resources continue to be invested in longer term development priorities. Budget reallocations by development agencies released billions to respond to new needs linked to COVID-19. France, for example, raised EUR 1.2 billion for COVID-19 through reallocations (Box 9.2).
In April 2020, France announced a EUR 1.2 billion package to support sub-Saharan African countries with their immediate and long-term COVID-19 response, including by sharing expertise, direct support to health systems, humanitarian assistance and an extensive COVID-19 research programme building on partnerships forged during Ebola outbreaks. The Health in Common Initiative (Santé en commun), a part of the package implemented by the French Development Agency, supports health systems and provides budget support and support to non-governmental organisations targeting the most vulnerable people. Between April and September, France committed 90% of the pledged funding, including EUR 150 million that was provided as grants.
At the international level, France advocated for a multilateral response to the crisis and the legitimate role of the World Health Organization and its One Health approach to environmental, animal and human health. Under Team Europe, France worked with the European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operation to organise airlifts of essential supplies to sub-Saharan Africa and played a central role in negotiating the Debt Service Suspension Initiative.
At country level, France mobilised its global health experts – many with significant experience from Ebola – to develop and strengthen public policies in developing countries. It also redirected technical experts from other projects to help national governments and local authorities to access financial resources and share good practice. It further advocated for safety nets and food aid to reach prisoners, refugees and other marginalised groups who were not always included in national response plans.
Raising resources to finance France’s COVID-19 response involved reallocating budgets, for example from scholarships, while making sure that the impact on other priority sectors was limited. Against this backdrop, France also remains committed to protecting official development assistance (ODA) and even increasing the proportion of national income dedicated to ODA to 0.55% by 2022 to sustain a strong COVID-19 response while safeguarding existing development investments.
Source: Information provided by the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs and the French Development Agency.
Transparent flow of information is crucial to tracking resources and need
Good pledging practices agreed by the DAC include, but are not limited to, stating the date or period covered, the source and terms of finance, and the baseline against which to assess any claims of additionality to existing flows or existing commitments (OECD, 2011[11]). The variety of approaches and sources of funding for the response to COVID-19 makes the task of tracking pledges and commitments challenging. For example, Devex set up a portal to track how funding pledges translated into contracts and projects, but it only proved possible for a fraction of total pledges (Box 9.3). Moreover, the time lag in official ODA statistical reporting to the OECD means that preliminary official aggregate data on ODA for COVID-19 will not be available before the first quarter of 2021. The OECD-DAC Creditor Reporting System is a statistical system and does not monitor real-time tracking of pledges, disbursements and allocations.5
By the end of March 2020, the international community had announced USD 4.5 trillion in funding for domestic and global responses to the growing global COVID-19 crisis. Funding announcements are public and transparent in so far as they generate publicity; however, what happens after is often more difficult to track.
To analyse how these announcements translate into programmes and deliverables that support health, economic, social and environmental responses to COVID-19, Devex tracked contracts, grants, new programme tenders and open funding opportunities using its existing funding database. This process helped identify actual flows to governments, sectors and communities in need. As of October 2020, Devex had tracked USD 171 billion through 781 programme announcements, though only USD 1.3 billion could be linked to 830 contracts that delivered on the ground.
What the database shows
Transparency varies according to funding source. Multilateral institutions, development banks and philanthropic organisations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation publish approved programmes, tenders and grants and thus provide the clearest information. Government funding is less transparent and private sector funding is even more difficult to track.
Determining whether funding announcements provide new money is more challenging. Several bilateral agencies or ministries openly announced they were repurposing their programmes to focus on the COVID-19 response, among them the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. This may mean that existing programmes can no longer continue. Other donors announced changes in how existing programmes would be delivered to adapt to restrictions, including the use of remote training and surveys. Devex decided not to consider such adjustments as funding for the COVID-19 response, but still includes this information in the database to support insights into changing donor priorities. Development co-operation actors use the Devex database to see how they compare to others or to identify gaps and build a business case to support new funding.
This information-collating exercise highlights that data transparency remains a challenge, despite the potential of information to inform smarter, data-driven funding responses, whether to COVID-19 or other issues. Aid visibility matters for the speed, cohesiveness and accountability of the international response, and tracking of funding is vital for timely co-ordination and effectiveness. COVID-19 is showing that much work is still needed in this space.
Note: Devex is a media platform used by the global development community. Its interactive portal is available at https://public.tableau.com/profile/devexdevdata#!/vizhome/COVIDFundingvisualisation/COVID-19fundin.
OECD governments are projecting a drop in national income and an increase in public expenditure at home. Sustaining or increasing ODA in this context sends a strong signal of global solidarity and several DAC members indicated at the November 2020 DAC High-Level Meeting that they will protect or increase their ODA budgets in 2021. However, the combined GBP 7.2 billion (USD 9.3 billion) cut in the United Kingdom’s 2020 (GBP 2.9 billion) and 2021 budget (GBP 4.3 billion), which is a major provider of ODA, makes it increasingly unlikely that overall total DAC ODA volumes will hold steady in 2020 and 2021 (House of Commons Library, 2020[12]).
COVID-19 has also triggered a funding crisis for development organisations, particularly local and international civil society organisations (CSOs). In recognition of their pivotal role, OECD governments and foundations have made their funding more flexible and granted exceptions to support their partners through a challenging period. For example, Italy provided EUR 13 million (USD 15 million) to help CSOs through the crisis; Germany reduced the co-finance element that CSOs must provide from 25% to 10%; Switzerland provided credit to the International Committee of the Red Cross and many UK charities have made use of the government’s Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme. However, despite these exceptional measures, many CSOs have been forced to halt programmes and downsize or lay off staff. Moreover, such exceptional measures to support CSOs may not be sustainable over time.
Budgetary reallocations created trade-offs that are still playing out
Initially, funding for COVID-19 response became available from funds that had not yet been committed or where lockdown situations and travel restrictions forced the delay or cancellation of programmes and activities such as volunteer programmes, posting experts abroad, scholarships, workshops and conferences. As time passed, additional reallocations came from delayed or underperforming programmes.
Lessons from past crises suggest that an effective response to COVID-19 requires concerted action across multiple sectors. It is thus critical to maintain an adequate distribution of ODA across key sectors, both for the COVID-19 response and for longer term development. Initial fears that the development community’s immediate pandemic response would have a narrow health focus did not fully materialise – through DAC networks, members have indicated that they prioritised visible secondary impacts of the crisis such as deteriorating governance and gender-based violence. For example, the United Kingdom set a strategy to ensure that resources to respond to the short-term impacts of COVID-19 are not diverted from priority areas such as girls’ education, climate, sexual and reproductive health, and gender-based violence services. The government of France, on the other hand, expects that ODA for education-related investments will fall in the short term and that they will catch up in the future. This reduction mirrors a more general trend of decreased funding to education in 2020, in spite of all the evidence linking education, particularly girls’ education, to better economic, social and human development, as discussed in Box 9.4. Some DAC members reported they cut investments targeting agriculture.
There was, nevertheless, a visible shift in funding towards health and humanitarian assistance. While a humanitarian response is one instrument to meet immediate needs, it is costly and can draw funding away from programmes aimed at long-term investments in systems that build resilience (OECD, 2019[13]). Norway and other DAC members have expressed concerns about reprioritisation of health budgets towards the COVID-19 response and away from other longer term health support, while noting that many OECD countries are grappling with a similar competition for funding within their own health systems. The increase in humanitarian funding plateaued by mid-2020, but assessments of emergency needs are still being revised upwards (International Crisis Group, 2020[14]; Norwegian Refugee Council, 2020[15]).
According to a recent analysis of International Aid Transparency Initiative data6 covering 70% of total ODA, ODA commitments in economic sectors and for conflict, peace and security, appear to have declined in 2020 compared to 2018 and 2019 levels, while the proportion of overall ODA going to low-income and fragile economies has not increased (Dodd, Breed and Coppard, 2020[16]). More comprehensive and detailed analysis will be possible by late 2021 when all project data for 2020 are reported to the OECD Creditor Reporting System.7
COVID-19 has caused the biggest disruption to education systems in history, according to data from a survey of 59 countries by the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills (OECD, 2020[17]). Moreover, the economic fallout from the pandemic, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, threatens all major sources of education financing – domestic education budgets, household contributions, remittance flows and international aid flows to education.
Prior to the crisis, levels and trends in domestic and external financing of education were already falling short of spending needs for SDG 4 (Education for All) (UNESCO, 2020[18]) and global progress was not on track to achieve it (UNESCO, 2019[19]), especially in low- and middle-income countries. In the current global context education financing available to developing economies could decline and further reduce the chances of achieving SDG 4 and the 2030 Agenda as a whole (UNSDG, 2020[20]).
Global actors, including the OECD, recommend actions designed to protect domestic and international financing of education. A Global Coalition for Education Response to COVID-19 (UNESCO, n.d.[21]) was established by UNESCO in April 2020 and an Education Post-COVID-19 Extraordinary Session of the Global Education Meeting 2020 (UNESCO, 2020[22]) was held virtually in October 2020 to mobilise the international community’s assets and expertise. Participants to the meeting recommended that countries should allocate at least 4-6% of gross domestic product and/or at least 15-20% of total public expenditure to education and the share of total official development assistance to education should increase to 15%, a level similar to the early 2000s. Lastly, international financing for education should be aligned to national COVID-19 response and recovery plans, in accordance with principles of effectiveness, targeting countries and populations most in need.
The growing gap between needs and resources in developing countries raises three financing challenges for international development co-operation. The first is how to mobilise more resources through ODA and other sources, to help make up the USD 2 trillion shortfall in COVID-19-related funding for developing countries, while also meeting financing commitments for the Sustainable Development Goals (OECD, 2020[23]). A second challenge is making existing development finance work harder to achieve development results. Some new and innovative approaches to programming and delivering development co-operation may be needed to meet this challenge, including tapping into local capacity, cutting costs, reducing duplication, and investing more in prevention and preparedness to reduce future risks (see Chapter 4). The third financing challenge is to focus stretched ODA resources on the countries and people who are most in need and least able to cope.
As a first step towards raising more financing, OECD countries could meet the targets they have set and find innovative ways to raise the money, such as setting aside a proportion of domestic stimulus packages for developing countries. Full accountability and transparency for all the funding decisions taken to date will require an ex post assessment of the extent to which pledges are honoured and whether funding is allocated in line with needs.
References
[9] BMZ (2020), Minister Müller zum Nachtragshaushalt 2020: Begrüße mehr Mittel für weltweite Corona-Sofortmaßnahmen [Minister Müller on the 2020 Supplementary Budget: Welcome More Funds for Immediate Global Corona Measures], German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development, Bonn, http://www.bmz.de/de/presse/aktuelleMeldungen/2020/juni/200619_Minister-Mueller-zum-Nachtragshaushalt-2020/index.html.
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[12] House of Commons Library (2020), Insight: Spending Review: Reducing the 0.7% aid commitment, https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/spending-review-reducing-the-aid-commitment/, Accessed 7 December 2020.
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[1] OECD (2020), Frequently Asked Questions on the ODA Eligibility of COVID-19 Related Activities, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://www.oecd.org/dac/financing-sustainable-development/ODA-eligibility_%20of_COVID-19_related_activities_final.pdf.
[23] OECD (2020), Global Outlook on Financing for Sustainable Development 2021: A New Way to Invest for People and Planet, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://dx.doi.org/10.1787/e3c30a9a-en.
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[2] Ofori-Atta, K. (2020), “Opinion – Ghanaian finance minister: Africa deserves more Covid help”, Financial Times, https://www.ft.com/content/fff9c354-dde5-4a4c-ab48-f11f289c2da9 (accessed on 3 November 2020).
[4] UN OCHA (2020), Appeals and Response Plans 2020, webpage, United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Geneva, https://fts.unocha.org/appeals/overview/2020 (accessed on 5 November 2020).
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[22] UNESCO (2020), “Education post-COVID-19: Extraordinary session of the Global Education Meeting (2020 GEM)”, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, https://en.unesco.org/news/education-post-covid-19-extraordinary-session-global-education-meeting-2020-gem (accessed on 25 November 2020).
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Notes
← 1. The OECD conducted the survey on COVID-19 funding in October 2020; 28 of the 30 DAC members responded.
← 2. This calculation is based on data in the Database of Fiscal Policy Responses to COVID-19 as of September 2020. The IMF (2020[5]) database summarises key fiscal measures announced or taken by governments in 190 economies.
← 3. The World Bank Group committed USD 160 billion in total. Included in this total is USD 104 billion from the IDA (mainly for low-income countries) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The remaining amount is from the International Finance Corporation and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency. For more information, see World Bank (2020[8]).
← 4. See Islamic Development Bank (2020[25]).
← 5. Several development actors report funding information through the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI, 2020[24]), a global initiative to improve the transparency of development and humanitarian resources and their results in addressing poverty and crises. Information is available at: https://iatistandard.org/en.
← 6. The IATI database includes data from 15 bilateral donors, 7 international financial institutions and 11 multilateral organisations, thus covering an estimated 70% of ODA.
← 7. The Creditor Reporting System has been amended to track COVID-19 expenses, based on what the DAC agrees can be reported as ODA. This will allow for analysis of 2020 data that will be reported to the OECD in 2021 and available on line by late 2021.