November 2025

ActionAid UK response to IDC inquiry: Future of UK aid and development assistance

About ActionAid UK

ActionAid is an international charity that works with women and girls living in poverty. Our staff are changing the world with women and girls. We are ending violence and fighting poverty so that all women and girls, everywhere, can create the future they want. We understand the deep-rooted problems facing women and girls and work alongside whole communities to find solutions. We make sure women and girls are safe from harm, able to earn a living and to claim their rights, and we prioritise their rights and leadership during times of crisis.

This response is focused on the questions below.

1.How should the Government be prioritising UK Official Development Assistance in the coming years?

The priorities for the use of ODA should be guided by the UK government’s multiple international commitments and legal obligations — including the statutory duty to allocate 0.7% of GNI to ODA; to uphold the International Development (Gender Equality) Act of 2014; to implement the National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security, and to fulfil commitments under the Paris Climate Agreement. In meeting these obligations, it is vital that the government prioritises gender equality and meeting the needs of the most marginalised. In all of the world’s most pressing challenges, whether that is climate change, conflict, or the cost-of-living crisis, women and girls are uniquely and often disproportionately impacted. At the same time, gender-based violence remains one of the most pervasive human rights abuses around the world. Despite experiencing multiple threats, women and girls are uniquely positioned to understand the root causes, needs, and realities of their communities through long-established, trusted relationships. As a result, they are central to advancing gender equality and to eradicating poverty and injustice.

Evidence shows national and local organisations and movements – including women’s rights organisations (WROs) and youth-lead organisations - are best placed to reach marginalised groups and deliver essential services in times of crisis. In addition, feminist movements and WROs are recognised as being the most effective agents for securing long lasting, transformative change on gender equality, including by leading to policy changes and shifting cultural norms.

Despite this, global ODA cuts – in tandem with an apprehension to funding national and local organisations - means that many WROs are having to scale back or close life-saving services; with UN Women reporting that only 5% of WROs surveyed expect to sustain operations beyond two years due to under-funding. ActionAid’s experience supports this – for example, WROs in Ethiopia, who provide humanitarian assistance during conflict, cited “insufficient budgets, and scarce long-term funding”, in addition to time-consuming bureaucracy. National and local organisations often do not have dedicated core and flexible funding, making it difficult to deliver sustainable and long-term support.

To that end, the UK government must:

-          Maintain, at a minimum, the current 12 per cent proportion of bilateral aid with gender equality as a ‘principal’ objective under the OECD DAC gender equality marker system. 

-          Ensure ODA funding for WROs and movements is long-term, core, flexible and for their self-determined priorities.

-          Protect proven and successful ‘standalone’ programmes focused on priority areas specifically affecting women and girls, such as WISH, What Works and the funding for Women’s Rights Organisations.

-          Enable an effective approach to gender mainstreaming across the department with sufficient resourcing and a twin-track strategy, alongside ‘standalone’ initiatives.

-          Ensure UK-funded programmes are informed by gendered analysis and the leadership, and priorities of women and girls at all stages, through consultation with WROs.

-          Promote and resource women and girls’ participation in decision-making spaces across the nexus.

3.What needs to change to realise the goal of moving from paternalistic models and relationships to partnerships?

-        How should UK ODA best be deployed to empower local delivery of aid and decision making around development?

To move from paternalism to partnership, a radical shift is needed in the UK’s foreign policy - including its macroeconomic approach - which must be underpinned by feminist, decolonial, intersectional and anti-racist approaches.

A key part of a partnership approach would be shifting power and resource to national and local organisations and movements including WROs. As ActionAid has shown, the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated the central role played by WROs as ‘first responders’. WROs are grounded in communities with longstanding and trusting relationships and without them it would be impossible to identify and deliver the life-saving services women and girls need, including in crises. Moreover, WROs are catalysts for long-term and transformational change.

Yet, women’s leadership is consistently undervalued - lacking political and financial support. Funding to WROs in crises, for example, remains at just 0.2% of total bilateral aid. Research by ActionAid also highlights unrealistic donor reporting standards and insufficient consultation with crisis-affected communities. While funding is vital, effective partnership also means meaningful consultation, accountability, trust and co-creation.  ActionAid has developed internal guidance for working with WROs, which we recommend as a basis for equitable partnerships. In Ukraine, ActionAid has worked with organisations traditionally excluded from receiving assistance, using a feminist and decolonial approach, and focused on providing flexible funding, and removing barriers to due diligence processes.

The UK has previously recognised the critical role of WROs. It can demonstrate its trust in feminist partners by :

-          Tracking and publishing the proportion and amount of ODA that goes directly to WROs

-          Resourcing WROs directly without the need for private sector or ‘global north’ based organisations to absorb the risk. This requires removing barriers from funding criteria to provide fast, long-term, flexible, core funding.

-          Promoting women’s leadership by collaborating with WROs at all stages of the programme cycle. This requires removing barriers to engagement, including English as the ‘default’ language and excessively burdensome, time-consuming and expensive visa requirements.

-          Undertaking intersectional analysis to understand and address how gender inequality is inseparable from other barriers

-          Taking a different approach to ‘evidence’ by valuing feminist approaches and decolonial research methods from the ‘global south’.

-          Facilitating and resourcing meaningful participation of WROs in international policy spaces. In recent years, the UK has hosted major global events and missed these opportunities to showcase participation and partnership. 

2. How does the UK’s delivery approach for a) development and b) humanitarian assistance need to adapt to the changing funding and values landscape?

5. How can the UK Government align its development work with taxpayers' expectation, and ensure value for money?

The effectiveness of ODA lies in the desired changes that women and girls see and experience – as a result, accountability should lie firmly with them. ActionAid has a proven track record of centring affected communities at the core of accountability systems: this involves devolving power, for example to adolescent girls. ActionAid’s work provides evidence that the most effective way to design and implement any work is to have that work led by those it is intended to support. This not only strengthens the impact and accountability but also streamlines implementation and removes unnecessary power structures (which can be expensive and lead to inefficiencies).

Shifting power and accountability also aligns with the changing funding and values landscape which rightly puts a greater emphasis on decolonisation and ‘localisation’. This should also extend to girls, who are frequently excluded from decision making spaces, and, contrary to evidence, deemed unsuitable to lead. Decolonisation approaches reject the idea that only ‘global north’ perspectives constitute legitimate knowledge. In line with this, shifting power means recognising and valuing the lived experiences of women and girls as valid, well-informed testimony rather than dismissing it as mere opinion.

ActionAid’s work has also shown that WROs and youth led organisations do not work in ‘humanitarian’ or ‘development’ silos, but that these in fact exist and adapt across ‘the nexus’ of development, humanitarian, and peacebuilding realities. Our work has also shown that the most effective humanitarian and development responses are led by WROs who reliably support communities in conflict-affected contexts, even in areas that are inaccessible to international organisations. ActionAid knows from our work in many contexts that WROs hold the trust of communities and often sit outside of traditional patriarchal and hierarchical structures. They are, therefore, best placed to reach marginalised groups and can better serve the whole population, enabling them to respond to - and even prevent - ongoing and future crises. For example, in Ukraine, youth-led organisations lead rapid response initiatives at the outbreak of the conflict, bringing innovation and intersectional perspectives, which traditional humanitarian responses have historically lacked. Despite this expertise, a survey of ActionAid partner organisations showed that 65% of respondents found international donors’ processes are too bureaucratic and are not fit for purpose for humanitarian response and the quick delivery needed to effectively deliver humanitarian support.

The UK must take a targeted approach and ensure that within a shrinking ODA budget, resource goes to the organisations which are most impactful – including by making funding applications more accessible to national and local organisations.

6. Where is reform needed in multilateral agencies and development banks the UK is a member of, and funds?

The IMF continues to enforce austerity policies that are little changed from its discredited Structural Adjustment Programmes of the 1980s. At the same time, the IMF is reluctant to acknowledge the scale of the debt crisis or to recognise that systemic global forces generate and perpetuate debt crises. Thus, rather than reforming a failed global system, each country is told to reform itself by cutting public spending. Women and marginalised groups face the greatest burden of these cuts, as primary users of essential services, as public sector workers, and when their unpaid care work increases as they become society’s ‘shock absorbers’ for cut services.

The IMF’s failure to acknowledge the debt crisis as systemic is a direct result of its powerful shareholders – of which the UK is one of the largest – exerting their influence and, as such, is a failure of governance. In line with its commitments to women and girls and to building trusted partnerships with ‘global south’ countries, the UK government must use its position on the IMF Board to push for transformative macroeconomic reform. This includes rejecting policy advice that demands or inevitably leads to public sector cuts, wage bill freezes, or reductions in health and education spending.

To break the vicious debt cycles faced by ‘global south’ countries – which undermine women and girls' rights and actively accelerate the climate crisis – the UK must recognise the failure of the present colonial debt architecture and support the creation of a UN Debt Convention to agree rules on responsible lending and borrowing. It must also introduce domestic legislation to ensure that no creditor can hold out for a better deal than government creditors through a Common Framework debt restructuring.

Additionally, the UK should support accelerated progress on the UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation for a fairer, more equitable, inclusive and effective framework for international tax cooperation. It must use its place on the Boards of the IMF and World Bank to promote progressive forms of taxation such as wealth and polluter taxes, corporation and capital gains taxes, fair allocation of taxing rights and the capacity of national tax authorities to collect them, rather than expanding regressive taxes such as VAT.

7. What is needed to achieve the Government’s objectives in terms of transforming its role to one of an investor from that of a donor?

-               What is the role of Development Finance Institutions in this transformation?

Economic development is crucial to eliminating poverty and injustice. However, ActionAid’s approach would challenge orthodox economic thinking, which has long instrumentalised and harmed women and girls in the interests of corporate profits, returns on investment, and economic growth, rather than prioritising redistribution, sustainability, human rights and the rights of women and girls as intrinsically invaluable. Such market-orientated, private-sector-led approaches also serve to detract from the fundamental duty of states to protect and advance human rights, including the rights of women and girls, as established under numerous human rights conventions.

Like feminist economists, ActionAid has long argued that economic growth does not automatically lead to gender equality and the elimination of poverty. To achieve these, there is a need to address the significant structural causes of poverty and inequality (including those rooted in colonialism, racism and patriarchy) and the role the UK currently plays in perpetuating these including through its harmful trade, investment and tax policies. Relatedly, the UK government must ensure that UK business activity does not undermine its ‘international development’, climate and gender equality ambitions. To this end, it should introduce a new Business, Human Rights and Environment Act, which would place a mandatory requirement on all UK companies, including tech companies and financial institutions, to undertake gendered human rights and environmental due diligence of their activities and supply chains, and to ensure access to remedy.

With regard to the role of DFIs, there is a need for the UK government and DFIs to systematically evaluate how its economic policies and approaches are impacting on the achievement of women and girls’ rights. This must include in relation to access to and quality of jobs, and how their investments impact on access to quality public services for women and girls experiencing poverty and exclusion. All evaluations of impact must be communicated in a timely and transparent way. More generally, we would be concerned if a shrinking ODA budget were to be channelled to DFIs ostensibly to support gender equality, at a time when there is a desperate need for scaled up funding for women’s rights through traditional ODA channels, including the need to dramatically step-up resourcing to WROs and youth-led organisations.

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