.jpg?width=1200&auto=webp&trim=0%2C0%2C0%2C0&ssl=1 "‘It’s time for China and India to really start providing foreign aid’")
Too much focus is being given to the impact of US aid cuts and not enough to the fact that countries like China and India continue to provide very little foreign aid, the head of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), one of the world’s largest humanitarian groups, has told The Independent.
In a wide-ranging interview held at the NGO’s headquarters in Oslo, Jan Egeland, NRC secretary general, also warned that not enough attention was being given to the climate crisis, and suggested that current plans to boost NATO military spending to five per cent of GDP at the expense of foreign aid is “a major strategic mistake” that countries will live to regret.
Mr Egeland – who formerly served as the UN’s humanitarian aid chief in the 2000s, and as state secretary in the Norwegian Foreign Ministry in the 1990s – said that NRC had been seriously impacted by President Trump’s gutting of US foreign aid programmes, with the NGO’s global headcount shrinking from 15,000 to 14,000 as a result.
“Until last year, the US was our largest donor, followed by the Norwegian government. Then the US funding was frozen overnight,” he said. The months that followed were extremely chaotic, Mr Egeland added, with US government stop and re-start orders often being received several times over for the same programmes.
Despite the US more recently once again signalling support for foreign aid after a year of global upheaval, Mr Egeland said that there remains a “huge question mark” over the level of funding NRC will receive from the US in the future.
Major humanitarian projects, including one providing cash transfers for thousands of victims of the war in Ukraine and another providing free flour to 500 bakeries in Sudan so that they can produced subsidised bread, have now been permanently cut for 2026, after receiving several stop- and re-start orders over the course of 2025.
But while US actions have caused mayhem for NGOs like NRC, Egeland believes there should equally be criticism of industrialised Asian countries that – beyond Japan and South Korea – currently provide minimal foreign aid.
“There has to be a much more aggressive calling out not just the US, but also other countries like China and the nations of Southeast Asia,” he said. “I think we can be far too obsessed with what Trump has been doing over the past few hours, and we can ignore the bigger picture.
“How can it be that India can carry out a moon landing on the dark side of the moon, but not provide aid for our operations in Sudan,” he continued. “Russia has hundreds of billions to wage a senseless war in Ukraine, but no money for our relief efforts,”
Norway, Mr Egeland added, is a country of just 5.5 million people, with no seat on the UN Security Council nor G20 membership, yet it has become the world’s ninth biggest national donor of humanitarian aid, as a result of its continued commitment to provide foreign aid worth one per cent of its Gross National Income (GNI). The country might have made a fortune from oil in recent decades, but other equally wealthy countries are contributing significantly less.
The UN target for foreign assistance is for wealthy countries to provide aid worth 0.7 per cent of GNI. The UK, by contrast, is set to provide only 0.3 per cent of GNI following cuts that were announced last year.
Still often classified as “developing countries” in some UN frameworks, China and India are not formally obligated under agreements such as the 1992 climate convention to provide foreign aid to poorer countries, even though their economies have grown substantially since those classifications were made.
Last year, China made a $16 million (£12m) contribution to humanitarian aid plans coordinated by the UN, while India contributed nothing. Norway and the UK contributed $921m and $1.9bn respectively.
Mr Egeland also warned that the strategy adopted by countries including the UK, Germany and France of slashing foreign aid to significantly boost military spending will not achieve its intended aims of stabilising Europe’s security situation.
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