The 2023 Official Development Assistance and Humanitarian Aid Figures
Author :
Cyprien Fabre
01/24/2025
2023 already feels like a long time ago. Everything moves so fast. Humanitarian actors live in a perpetual present. It is cold right now in Armenia and Ukraine. Fear is present tonight in Sudan as well. And thirst cannot wait until tomorrow in Mayotte or elsewhere. Humanitarians do not drive while looking in the rearview mirror, but the OECD does.
Humanitarian responses around the world consist of thousands of individual projects that must be aggregated to gain an overall picture of funding levels, measure efforts, and make comparisons. Once a contract is signed, disbursed amounts are recorded by geographical or thematic offices, consolidated by a ministry, Bercy in France’s case, and then submitted to the OECD. The OECD reviews each project line by line to ensure that it meets the criteria for Official Development Assistance (ODA), of which humanitarian assistance is a major component.
This is how, in mid-January this year, the OECD published the official figures for Official Development Assistance in 2023. In 2023, total ODA reached USD 223.3 billion, continuing an upward trend that began in 2007. This increase can be partly explained by growing humanitarian funding, which rose by 5.9%.
The Largest Donors
Whether considering ODA overall or humanitarian assistance specifically, funding remains highly concentrated. The United States remains by far the largest donor, providing USD 64.7 billion in ODA, including USD 14.5 billion in humanitarian assistance. Humanitarian funding increased both in volume and as a share of ODA during the first Trump administration, and it is difficult to predict what will happen next, even in the short term. Far behind come Germany (USD 37.9 billion in ODA, including USD 2.4 billion in humanitarian assistance) and the European Union institutions (USD 26.9 billion in ODA, including USD 3 billion in humanitarian assistance). Ranked sixth, after Japan and the United Kingdom, France was among the major donors in 2023, providing USD 15 billion in ODA, but only USD 410 million in humanitarian assistance.
This historical concentration carries well-known risks. A reduction in funding from one of the largest contributors has the potential to destabilize the entire humanitarian financing system, as such a decrease could not be offset by the combined contributions of medium-sized or smaller donors, even if they had the capacity and willingness to do so. The budget announcements of 2024 and 2025, already discussed in previous editions of Défis Humanitaires, suggest that this risk is no longer theoretical. Members of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC), which brings together the principal ODA contributors, still account for by far the largest share of global development and humanitarian efforts.
Non-DAC donors, often referred to as « non-traditional donors, » are important contributors to humanitarian solidarity, but their funding patterns tend to be less predictable. In 2023, humanitarian financing from non-DAC donors was led by Türkiye, which remained above USD 5 billion for the seventh consecutive year, followed by the United Arab Emirates, whose humanitarian contributions rose from USD 278 million in 2022 to USD 1 billion in 2023.
French Official Development Assistance
French ODA generally follows the same trends as those observed among other DAC countries. Beyond the overall decline in ODA in 2023, however, France is distinguished by significantly lower levels of humanitarian funding.
The recent increase in humanitarian funding represented an interesting development, but it did not substantially alter France’s overall humanitarian effort. Humanitarian assistance rose from 2% to 4% of French bilateral ODA between 2022 and 2023, still far below the DAC average, which remains around 15%. The two charts below illustrate the composition of French ODA compared with that of DAC countries. (Interactive versions of the charts are available here: FR Final 2023 Statistics | Flourish.)
Where does this aid go? For the second consecutive year, Ukraine was the largest recipient of ODA and other concessional financing in 2023, receiving USD 38.9 billion, an increase of 28.5% compared with 2022. Ukraine received nearly five times more aid from DAC members than the second-largest recipient, India.
The same trend is evident in humanitarian financing. Across all donors combined, humanitarian funding to Ukraine increased by 23% in 2023, reaching USD 3.5 billion, making it the world’s largest recipient of humanitarian assistance.
Other countries also received substantial humanitarian aid. Ethiopia received USD 1.6 billion (+6%), Gaza USD 1.7 billion (+122%), Somalia USD 1.2 billion (+51%), the Democratic Republic of the Congo USD 1.2 billion (+108%), and Sudan USD 865 million (+19%).
Other countries received more modest amounts of humanitarian funding, often with significant year-on-year variations in response to unfolding events. Armenia received USD 5 million in 2022, but USD 35 million in 2023. Chad received USD 379 million in assistance, an increase of 119%, driven in part by the arrival of additional Sudanese refugees.
It is worth remembering that 2023 was also marked by several natural disasters affecting already fragile contexts, including Libya, Syria, Papua New Guinea, Madagascar, Malawi, Tanzania, Morocco, and Türkiye. In all of these settings, including those that typically receive relatively little aid, humanitarian funding was significant.
The Central Sahel maintained levels of humanitarian funding similar to previous years, indicating that while successive coups had a clear impact on bilateral development cooperation, they affected humanitarian responses to a lesser extent.
Who Delivers Humanitarian Aid?
The financial structures that underpin humanitarian action are now highly developed. They were built by, and for, actors that have established mechanisms enabling them to mobilize funds rapidly.
In 2023, multilateral agencies managed half of all humanitarian funding, although this share has gradually declined over time. These same agencies accounted for 60% of humanitarian funding in 2020. The share of humanitarian financing managed by NGOs remained relatively stable, reaching 28% in 2023.
One noteworthy development is the increasing contribution, since 2021, of funding directed toward resilience projects categorized as humanitarian in nature. Examples include projects funded by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) in Afghanistan and Ukraine, addressing issues such as forced displacement and food security.
These funding channels, categorized as « other » in the chart above, accounted for 15% of humanitarian financing in 2023, compared with only 3% in 2020.
At a time when the classification of projects is not always clearly humanitarian in the traditional Dunantist sense of the term, and when the boundaries between short-term emergency response and long-term development are increasingly blurred, new actors are emerging on the humanitarian finance scene.
This trend is likely to continue, driven both by anticipated reductions in traditional ODA and by evolving conceptions of the very nature of cooperation between countries.
It would be wise to prepare for it.
Biography
Cyprien Fabre
Cyprien Fabre is the Head of the Crisis and Fragility Unit at the OECD. A former Solidarités volunteer, then head of several offices for DG ECHO, he joined the OECD in 2016 to analyse the engagement of Development Assistance Committee members in fragile countries and refine the contribution of development assistance to peace objectives in crisis contexts.