6 days ago
France's global aid programmes at risk from ‘unprecedented' budget cuts
Almost 190 non-governmental organisations are sounding the alarm after the historic €700 million in cuts to France's aid budget announced by Prime Minister François Bayrou on July 15. The figure accounts for roughly 5 percent of the total allocated to development aid.
The measure is part of a planned €43.8 billion in budget cuts planned for 2026 to reduce France's burgeoning public deficit.
'It's unprecedented,' said Corentin Martiniault, an advocacy officer at Coordination Sud, a network of 188 French NGOs working in emergency humanitarian response including Médecins du Monde and Handicap International.
French aid has until now allowed 'the financing of access to essential services such as health, water and food, but also the protection of populations in vulnerable and extremely fragile situations', Martiniault said.
In a press release on Wednesday, Coordination Sud warned that the new budget guidelines 'could endanger poor and vulnerable populations around the world".
Out of step
As recently as last year, France still held a top position among international aid donors, ranking fifth in the world for official development assistance behind the US (at 30 percent), Germany, the UK and Japan, respectively, according to the OECD.
If these cuts are confirmed, Martiniault said the public aid budget 'will be set back 10 years'.
Since President Emmanuel Macron came to power in 2017, France has made international aid a political priority, significantly increasing its aid budget, Martiniault noted. But that all changed in 2024, he said, when 'France was one of the first countries to decide to make a major U-turn by reducing its budget for official development assistance.'
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'We don't deny that the budgetary situation is challenging, but we note that the aid and development budget consistently finds itself among the top three budgets hardest hit by any cuts,' he added.
After an initial €724 million was slashed from the aid budget in February 2024, more than €2 billion in further cuts have since been approved. An April 25 decree from the economy ministry cancelled another €200 million in appropriations.
Martiniault said the cuts revealed a growing disconnect between years of government statements in support of foreign development and an aid budget that is being cut ever closer to the bone.
A critical situation
France is not the only country to culling its foreign aid budget, with Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium and the UK all similarly reducing their levels of development assistance. US President Donald Trump's shock dismantlement of USAID, the main US development agency, has also dealt a huge blow to global health and development efforts.
'Adding further cuts to an already dire situation – marked by the withdrawal of many donors along with the weakening of UN agencies and structures capable of engaging directly with vulnerable populations in matters of health and nutrition – is catastrophic,' said Flore Ganon, head of advocacy for rights and essential services at Action contre la Faim (Action Against Hunger) France, another member organisation of Coordination Sud.
Action contre la Faim experienced a 20 percent funding cut for its Confluences Project, which aims to reduce severe malnutrition among children under 5 in Madagascar, the Ivory Coast, Chad, Cameroon, Mauritania and Burkina Faso.
'We're going to find ourselves in countries where our ability to intervene will be reduced,' Ganon said.
All the more so due to the group's partial reliance on funding from the now-shuttered USAID.
'The US cuts forced us to shut down nutrition centers basically overnight,' she said.
It's a situation made all the more worrying by UN figures that show that hunger has been on the rise across the world since 2017, with some 733 million people suffering from malnutrition as of 2023 – twice the population of the European Union.
'Democratic backsliding'
'From our point of view, the reduction announced for the 2026 budget is not just a moral error, but a tactical one,' said Médecins du Monde president Jean-François Coty. 'When it comes to the struggle against inequality and major pandemics, one day we'll all pay dearly for it.'
Coty also warned of the possible impacts of the decision on democratic values.
'Cutting international aid means getting rid of many NGOs,' he said. 'It's a form of democratic backsliding.'
Around half of Médecins du Monde's budget is raised through fundraising activities and private donors – a fact that allows it to keep operating in the face of deepening budget cuts.
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'Today, some of our programmes will continue thanks to our reserves, and we will meet our commitments,' Coty said. 'But nothing guarantees that we'll be able to renew or expand them.'
'We have funding in advance, but it's hard to predict the future.'
The new reality may mean a rethink of how many NGOs operate.
"In the coming years, the overall decline in institutional funding will have an impact on us,' Coty warned. 'We are likely to see a stagnation or even a slight decline in our operations. You can't make up for the loss of major institutional funding in a few months or a few years. We will have to reorganise to be able to compensate, in particular through private funding.'
A key role
While Macron has announced an increase of €3.5 billion in 2026 and €3 billion in 2027 for the country's defence budget against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, NGOs maintain that defence and development are not in competition, but complimentary.
Humanitarian aid plays "a key role in preventing conflicts by tackling their root causes, such as access to education, water or the response to climate change", Martiniault said.
For the NGOs that are members of Coordination Sud, other sources of funding may be possible. Revenues from the taxes on financial transactions and airline tickets were funnelled into development assistance until 2024. While the 2025 budget bill suddenly incorporated them into the state's overall budget, a bill supported by 70 MPs aims to reinstate the aid allocation.
