Written evidence submitted by the ONE Campaign to the International Development Select Committee enquiry into the Future of UK Aid and Development Assistance – November 2025
About the ONE Campaign:
The ONE Campaign is an international development advocacy and campaigning organisation, which exists to create economic opportunities and healthy lives in Africa. We have been at the centre of campaigns for global health, to protect development budgets in order to raise vital funds for the fight against poverty, and to call for measures to ensure that aid is spent effectively and meets high standards of transparency. We believe that this is vital for maintaining public confidence in our aid budget.
How should the Government be prioritising UK Official Development Assistance in the coming years?
On 25 February, the British Prime Minister announced that the UK would be reducing international development budget to increase funding for defence. By 2027, the aid budget will have been cut from 0.5% of GNI to 0.3% of GNI, equivalent to approximately a 40% cut in current prices, to help offset an increase in defence spending from 2.3% of GDP to 2.5% of GDP. Capping the UK’s aid budget at 0.3% of GNI will put UK aid at its lowest level in over 25 years - at a time when global crises are compounding, and the needs are greater than ever.
Out of the UK’s top 20 bilateral recipients of aid, thirteen are fragile and conflict affected states, including Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza, Syria, and Afghanistan. ONE’s recent analysis shows that conflict prevention is significantly less costly than crisis response: every $1 spent on activities that spur economic growth and political stability can avert spending of up to $103 on a future conflict.
Most critically, UK aid saves lives, educates children, averts global health crises, and helps boost economic prosperity. The UK’s aid cut puts hundreds of thousands of lives at risk. With a reduced aid budget, we therefore believe that UK development spending should prioritise its commitments to the most effective multilateral funds to ensure the maximum impact for every pound of its development spend. Our support for these commitments not only maximises their impact, it also encourages partner countries to make strong commitments too.
The UK was right to prioritise funding Gavi, the Vaccines Alliance, pledging £1.25 billion in funding for the next replenishment cycle. This will contribute towards the mass immunisation of millions of children around the world, saving countless lives. Similarly, the UK’s strong 3-year commitment to the World Bank’s International Development Association (IDA) in 2024, the world’s largest multilateral social protection fund, will leverage 4 times that amount for financing to the poorest countries.
In the context of deep cuts to the overall budget for international assistance, the recent announcement of an £850 million investment in the Global Fund is a welcome commitment to collective efforts to fight HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria – but ministers must go further. This pledge could help save 1.4 million lives in the next three years. But if the government had matched the UK’s previous commitment, it could have helped save a further 255,000 lives, many of them children. It is the devastating 40% cut to the overall budget for international assistance that has forced officials into impossible, life-or-death decisions.
Last week, it was revealed that £74 million has been saved by reducing the cost of hotel accommodation for asylum seekers here in the UK - money that had been taken from the international assistance budget. These funds should be reallocated to the FCDO and ministers should use them to top up the Global Fund pledge, helping to save more lives and increasing the chances of a successful replenishment in Johannesburg.
Lastly, the UK is co-hosting the African Development Fund’s 3-year replenishment this year alongside Ghana. We urge the UK government to commit to a pledge of at least £650 million to this fund, which provides concessional loans for African countries to fund their own economic and social development projects. This fund has helped to create jobs and grow economies across Africa, which is the ultimate route towards lifting people out of poverty, and creating strong and resilient economies and health systems across the continent.
How does the UK’s delivery approach for a) development and b) humanitarian assistance need to adapt to the changing funding and values landscape?
We need a renewed understanding of what ODA should be and how it fits as one part of a bigger strategy for international cooperation. An ODA vision for the mid-21st century should include at least three dimensions – addressing development challenges, redistributing wealth, and transmitting shared values.
In terms of addressing development challenges, ODA must offer part of the answer to these, especially in the least developed countries where other resources are not yet harnessed, and in vital fundamental needs such as emergency humanitarian response and fighting preventable disease and malnutrition. Reformed ODA must be more than just an emergency service. Firefighting without fire prevention is wasteful and has a deadly cost. So ODA must be invested in supporting countries to develop and deliver the childhood vaccines that prevent disease, not just in treating that disease when it takes hold, or in strengthening the resilience of countries to the impact of climate change, not just dealing with the inevitable floods and droughts when they come.
Secondly, ODA should be seen as a tool for the redistribution of wealth. In an increasingly interdependent world, the argument for shifting some wealth from where it has been most accumulated to where it can have the widest benefit is as strong when applied across borders as within them. National societies have always understood this not as an act of charity, but in everyone’s enlightened self-interest. Mutual international investments in sustainable growth, stability, health, and prosperity are win-win, not zero-sum.
Third, ODA should be an expression of transmitting shared values. It must be an authentic and contemporary channel of those instincts of humanity: for cooperation, empathy, and partnership. Transactions that are merely tools for extracting power or for gaining geopolitical advantage have no place in this definition. These transactional features were characteristic of ODA during the Cold War — and a new era of “great power dominance” risks repeating the same blueprint, with its accompanying corruption and inefficiency.
Seen in these three ways, ODA can be a cornerstone for the future, not a crumbling relic of the past.
What needs to change to realise the goal of moving from paternalistic models and relationships to partnerships?
First, we must find a way to talk more about the ends of international cooperation and development, not just the means to achieve them. The 55-year-old target to see 0.7% of national income spent on ODA helps measure countries’ respective inputs. Without inputs, outcomes are impossible. But the 0.7% target fails to describe desired outcomes. In times of constrained resources, inputs must be justified by a compelling vision for what they will achieve. It has also become a too-convenient framework for the new ‘race to the bottom’ started by the American and British cuts. The 0.7% is not our destination. It is necessary fuel to help get us there. Where we are going needs to be much better stated.
Our second ‘beyond ODA’ challenge is to ensure that reformed ODA sits at the centre of a modern, multilayered finance system for international cooperation. One that matches grants with fairer concessional finance, embraces nontraditional sources of funds, tackles the punitive cost of capital that holds back many economies — especially in Africa — and reforms global financial institutions to reflect today’s realities. ODA must work alongside these new forms of finance, and all these flows must be guided by the voices of those they are meant to support, as locally as possible, not dictated from afar. And at the heart of this shift must be a commitment to genuine partnership — moving from a model of giving and receiving to one of shared investment in development, particularly where there are mutual benefits.
Third, we need a new mutuality. In a world of intersecting crises, it’s clear we all have as much to learn as to offer. When Valencia and Los Angeles flood and burn as readily as the Sahel, the case for mutual support is only growing. Knowledge exchange, not just transfer, must define this next era.
And finally, we need an ambitious, sustained, people-powered movement. As division and transactional zero-sum calculation surges, we need an international campaign to insist that cooperation beats competition, that global challenges need shared solutions based on mutual interest, that we really do have more in common than that which divides us and that there are still great and hard things we can achieve when we come together as humanity.
We must describe in vivid terms an end goal that can motivate and animate new generations of policymakers and the public. And alongside a new language, we need new routes to market. The media landscape has fragmented. Attention is short and polarised. Getting heard now means working differently and is not a quick or easy win.
Where can complementarity be found between the UK’s aid philosophy and obligations, and its wider foreign policy objectives of economic growth and national security?
At ONE, we recently commissioned research[1] that shows for every $1 spent on activities that spur economic growth and political stability can avert spending of up to $103 on a future conflict. In 2023, conflicts cost the global economy $19.1 trillion — roughly equivalent to the economy of the European Union and more than the combined economies of Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and South Asia. On an individual level, that would be an estimated cost of $2,380 for every person on the planet. This accounts for military and security expenditures, economic losses, and lives lost due to violence. Factoring in the impacts on human health and wellbeing as well as the full effects on future economic growth and stability, the real costs are far greater.
Resolving conflicts rightfully receives a lot of global attention. But conflict prevention is the smarter, more cost-effective solution, resulting in saved lives, stabilised economies, and reduced need for costly military interventions. As mentioned earlier, every $1 spent on activities that spur economic growth and political stability—such as making governments more transparent and accountable, creating jobs, and improving public services—can avert spending of up to $103 on a future conflict and its aftermath, according to new research by academics and IMF staff.
Countries with the largest development needs face the greatest risk of conflict and account for a disproportionate number of the world’s active conflicts. They are frequently beset by high poverty levels, weak government institutions, poor social services, high debt burdens, and strained budgets. These factors make them more susceptible to political instability and conflict. It is in these countries – those with elevated conflict risk and lower state capacity – that the biggest benefits can be gained from conflict prevention policies.
The inverse is also true: past conflict is the greatest predictor of future conflict and economic deterioration, and countries recovering from conflict are more susceptible to future conflict. The presence of violence is equivalent to a 30% tariff on international trade. Even just the perception of violence can scare away international travellers and investors. This vicious cycle imperils peacebuilding efforts, reinforcing the need for development spending that proactively stabilises countries.
We can't take this for granted. Investments in official development assistance pay a sizable return in lives and money saved. They help bolster political stability and economic growth by strengthening government institutions, the rule of law, and anti-corruption efforts; fostering economic opportunities in the private sector; and assisting with better delivery of government services, such as health, education, and electricity. Plus, they build strategic partnerships across the world that strengthen national security, bolster economic ties, and protect against deadly diseases.
Every dollar spent on development saves lives, money, and averts future crises. That's why donor governments should take concrete measures today to help prevent conflicts tomorrow. That includes prioritising aid budgets, unlocking hundreds of billions of dollars through multilateral development bank reforms, supporting debt relief to debt distressed countries, and supporting efforts to lower the cost of capital for lower-income countries.
How should the government be communicating the results of UK aid, and its importance, to the public?
At ONE, we are deeply engaged in the question of how to better engage the public in the UK’s aid and development work. A number of our founders and leaders were involved in the Jubilee 2000 and Make Poverty History campaigns of the 1990s and 2000s, and believe that the mobilisation of a wide range of support via government, civil society, charities, political parties, arts, sports and culture is key to building and maintaining public support for the UK’s work tackling global poverty. It is clear that this must be done in a different way as some of the approaches of previous decades are less effective now.
We believe there is strong support for the UK’s overseas commitments, provided this is communicated in the right ways to different audiences, and the public are made aware of 1) the actual proportion of UK GNI which is spent on ODA and 2) the impact of this work. We work closely with the Development Engagement Lab (and the Aid Attitudes Tracker before that), who have been tracking support for government spending on development aid for 12 years, and found the following:
This work also demonstrated that the top three priorities for the UK public are aid for global health, humanitarian assistance and education. We believe the government should focus its communications around Britain’s ODA spend on these priorities, and demonstrate the tangible impact that UK spending commitments are making to communities around the world.
At ONE we also commissioned polling in October 2025, with More in Common to dig into public attitudes specifically towards global health funding, timed to coincide with the government’s decision about UK Global Fund replenishment. The results were clear- 62% of the public thought the UK should maintain or increase its current level of financial support to the global fund, while 28% wanted to cut it.
There is clearly strong public support for the UK’s work towards global health. The polling also showed that Britons see the COVID-19 vaccine as the country’s biggest achievement of the 21st century so far - cited by more than 1 in 3 (35 per cent) members of the public. Hosting the 2012 Olympics is also commonly cited (24 per cent), alongside two of Britain’s most notable aid interventions: the country’s role in reducing deaths from AIDS, TB, and malaria around the world, and the UK’s role in supporting Ukraine.
The future of public communications on UK aid and development
In partnership with Project Everyone, we have produced ‘The Hope Report’[2], a landmark report and call to action which highlights the incredible progress made on global health and international development since the start of the millennium, and the need for international collaboration to achieve this. We used this report to communicate with Parliamentarians and the UK government about the impact that the UK’s contribution to this work has had, and have had feedback about how useful it has been to collate this in one place.
Going forward, we intend to use this report as a basis for some more public engagement on the impact of UK aid and development, and are planning a wider campaign. Ultimately, we think that as both a sector, and in government, those of working on the UK’s international commitments need to get better at communicating the impact of our work in clear ways, celebrating our successes, and giving the UK public a sense of pride and ownership over the results that taxpayers’ money has helped to fund.
While we are clear on the need for sustained public engagement on these issues, we also know that the cause of international development will never be the top concern of people in the UK (or any other country). Enlightened and ambitious UK action on international development will always rely first and foremost on political leadership. Efforts to engage and mobilise the public are necessary, but they are not a substitute for that leadership.
[1] https://data.one.org/analysis/conflict-prevention-less-costly
[2] https://globalgoals.org/behope/