Aid funds must go ‘further and faster’ in a ‘ruthless’ age of humanitarian austerity

The EU needs to do more with less aid money, the bloc’s humanitarian aid commissioner Hadja Lahbib said on Wednesday (27 May). 

The conclusion, which accompanied an EU Commission paper on the ‘EU’s humanitarian action in a shifting global order’, is hardly a surprise. 

Over the past two years, official development assistance budgets have seen the biggest drops since records began, while senior EU officials have increasingly talked about how to ‘leverage’ aid to pursue EU policy goals such as reducing migration. 

The EU would “remain a reliable and principled donor in a global aid system under severe pressure”, Lahbib told reporters. But there is a caveat. 

“In a ruthless world , we have to ask ‘where does Europe stand’. Europe is choosing a path based on fairness, cooperation and human compassion”. 

She added that 239 million people across the world need humanitarian assistance in 2026, up from 31 million in 2006, according to the United Nations. 

“We need an innovative response…a revolution in our humanitarian aid. We need to do things faster, more effectively,” said Lahbib. 

Although aid spending appears to be popular among voters – Lahbib pointed to surveys that suggest that nine out of 10 Europeans are proud of being a major aid donor – aid budgets were among the first to be sacrificed to help cover the costs of the Covid-19 pandemic and then increase defence spending. 

Supply chain duplication 

The commission says that aid organisations such as UN bodies and others like the Red Cross, have developed “parallel supply chains which operate largely separately” and that this can lead to “unnecessary duplication of efforts, higher costs and in some cases slower delivery.”