The OECD-DAC preliminary figures released in April 2026 put numbers to what programme officers have been signalling since early 2025. Official development assistance from DAC members fell to USD 174.3 billion in 2025, down 23.1% on 2024. That is the largest annual contraction on record, and the second consecutive year of decline.
For African organisations the cut is deeper than the headline. Bilateral aid to Africa fell 23.9%. Bilateral ODA to sub-Saharan Africa fell 26.3%.
One donor accounts for most of it. United States ODA fell 56.9% year-on-year, the largest volume reduction by any provider in any year on record, and drove roughly three quarters of the total decline. Humanitarian funding took the sharpest hit of any category, down 35.8% to USD 15.5 billion.
The OECD projects a further 5.8% fall across DAC members in 2026.
Read the composition, not the total
The aggregate hides where the money went. Bilateral ODA fell 26.4% to USD 126.4 billion. Multilateral ODA fell 12.7% to USD 47.9 billion — half the rate.
That gap matters for portfolio decisions. Organisations funded primarily through direct bilateral agreements absorbed close to the full contraction. Organisations with multilateral windows, pooled funds, or UN-agency subcontracts absorbed less than half of it.
If your funding base is concentrated in one or two bilateral relationships, the 26.3% figure is not your worst case. It is your average case.
Three pools the ODA statistics do not capture
Official development assistance measures government-to-government and government-to-multilateral flows. Three other pools are open to African organisations and sit outside that measurement entirely.
Climate finance is the largest, and the access gap is the opportunity
Africa currently receives about USD 30 billion a year in reported climate finance inflows, roughly 12% of estimated need. Sub-Saharan Africa requires around USD 51 billion annually in adaptation finance and received USD 12.9 billion in 2023.
The Green Climate Fund had a record year in 2025, with its Board channelling USD 3.26 billion to developing countries across 22 new projects, with adaptation approvals weighted towards Least Developed Countries and African States.
The binding constraint is access, not availability. Less than half of committed adaptation funds in Africa were disbursed between 2014 and 2018. GCF accreditation runs a multi-stage process that favours applicants with stronger administrative capacity. Organisations that build that capacity are competing for a pool that is growing while ODA contracts.
Most resilience, agriculture, water and health programmes carry adaptation relevance that is never articulated in proposals. That is an unclaimed asset, not a new programme.
African philanthropy moves on different timelines
Continental funders — Mastercard Foundation, Tony Elumelu Foundation, Mo Ibrahim Foundation — run shorter decision cycles than bilaterals and weight African-led governance in their selection. They are not replacing ODA volume. They are reachable without a two-year cultivation cycle.
Corporate social investment has professionalised
Banks, telcos and insurers across East and West Africa now run grant processes resembling development-finance pipelines: theory of change, logframes, M&E frameworks. Individual grants are smaller, typically USD 20,000 to USD 200,000, but they are annual, renewable, and built on relationships rather than calls. Teams that treat corporate social investment as a soft target lose to teams that resource it like bilateral fundraising. If you sit on the corporate side, see how we work with CSR teams.
What we would do in the next 90 days
- Score your portfolio by exposure. Separate funders into bilateral, multilateral, philanthropic and corporate. Bilateral concentration above 60% is the risk position going into 2026.
- Write down the adaptation relevance of every programme you run. Emissions, resilience, water security, loss and damage. Most organisations discover two or three qualifying programmes.
- Shortlist five funders outside your current base and begin cultivation now. A donor relationship takes 6 to 12 months to move from first contact to first grant, which means relationships opened this quarter fund the 2027 budget, not this one. The sequencing is set out in our 7-step donor pipeline framework.
- Check what is currently open. Our funding opportunities database tracks live calls across the continent.
A 26.3% contraction removes the margin for a fundraising strategy built on one funder type. The organisations that hold their budgets through 2026 will be the ones that diversified before they had to.
Diversification is a strategy question before it is a proposal question. We cover the full method in the complete guide to resource mobilization in Kenya, and teach it in our resource mobilization training.
Sources
- OECD, International aid fell sharply in 2025, April 2026
- OECD, A historic decline in foreign aid: preliminary 2025 ODA data
- Green Climate Fund, record-breaking year, USD 3.26 billion channelled in 2025
- Africa Policy Research Institute, Climate Finance in Africa