The Future of Aid in Africa
- APF Community
- 9 hours ago
- 5 min read
by Mohamed Okash
It’s the end of an era. In 2025, the age of development aid (“foreign aid”), as Africa has known it, is ending, and it will have profound implications for the future of many people who live throughout the continent. The OECD projects a 9% to 17% drop in global official development assistance (ODA) this year – on top of a 9% cut in aid in 2024.
Historically the largest recipient, Africa will be hit hardest: sub-Saharan Africa could lose up to 28% of bilateral aid by 2025. This decline is structural. Africa’s share of global ODA has already fallen by 11 percentage points in the last decade. Meanwhile, major donor priorities are shifting toward aging populations, domestic budgets, and rising military expenditures. For the first time since the mid-1990s, all four of the largest donors, the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany, are reducing aid simultaneously.
If the aid model is no longer sustainble; it’s the time to think about what comes next?
In June 2025, African leaders and global partners gathered at the Financing for Development Conference (FfD4) in Seville, Spain. The Sevilla Commitment was unambiguous: “business as usual is no longer an option.” Rather than demanding more pledges, African leaders demanded systemic reform in financing for development.
The immediate impact has been devastating. It’s already tearing through African lives. The Lancet estimates that continued U.S. retrenchment alone could cause 14 million additional deaths globally by 2030.
Nowhere is the human cost clearer than in Somalia. According to CARE, aid cuts in 2025 forced the closure of more than 150 health facilities, leaving 1.5 million people without access to care. More than 37,000 children lost access to schooling, while another 4,000 youth were pushed out of non-formal education exposing them to child labour, early marriage, and extremist recruitment.
Yet across much of the continent, the political response has been muted. For many, aid had long been viewed as wasteful, politicised, or corrosive of local capacity. Former Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta gave voice to this mood when he said: “Instead of crying, we should ask ourselves: ‘What are we going to do to support ourselves?’” The remark echoed a growing recognition that while aid has saved lives, it rarely builds new foundations for sustainable development. As Oxford economist Stefan Dercon observed, “Aid saves lives, but it does not bring development.”
The pain is immediate and undeniable and it signals a moment of transition. The decline in foreign aid is accelerating Africa’s confrontation with a difficult but necessary question: Can the continent finance its own transformation?
A Foresight Lens: From Collapse to Renaissance
Foresight challenges us to see beyond today’s turbulence, to step into futures not yet written, where Africa’s trajectory is shaped as much by imagination as by policy. If we map the possibilities to 2040 through a Futures Table, four distinct pathways emerge:
Collapse: Aid vanishes and is not replaced. Domestic mobilisation falters, states stagger under debt and fragility deepens. In this future, Africa is remembered as the continent abandoned by donors and unable to seize its own tools of sovereignty.
Adaptation: The vacuum left by ODA is partially filled. Remittances, Gulf state financing, philanthropy, and patchwork reforms keep the lights on, but resilience is uneven. Some nations muddle through while others fall behind, creating a fragmented landscape of winners and losers.
Transformation: Global financial reforms take root. Illicit flows are curbed, Africa monetises its natural assets, and financing is mobilised at scale. Here, the continent is no longer a passive recipient but a co-architect of a more balanced financial order.
Self-Reliance Renaissance: Africa writes its own cheques. By 2040, domestic taxation, sovereign capital markets, diaspora bonds, and intra-African investment provide the backbone of growth. This is the Africa that not only survives the end of aid but thrives because of it, turning necessity into sovereignty.
These are not prophecies, but possibilities. The path Africa walks should be designed and decided by its leaders and people. The future of aid in Africa, in truth, is not about aid at all, it is about the rethinking the statue quo and imagining new futures to build the Africa we want as per the Agenda of 2063.
Five Strategic Pathways Beyond Aid
Building on the Sevilla Commitment, foresight and data point to five strategic pathways that could define Africa’s financial sovereignty in a post-aid world.
1. Align with Africa’s own priorities. Despite decades of donor-driven programming, only 6% of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are on track in Africa. Meeting the ambitions of Agenda 2063 requires at least $330 billion annually. Using backcasting, starting from the 2063 horizon and tracing backward, the fiscal and institutional reforms needed today close this gap. The practical step is clear: international cooperation must be anchored in African blueprints such as Agenda 2063, the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), and emerging long-term visions such as Somalia’s Vision 2060.
2. Maximise domestic financial resources. Africa loses nearly $90 billion every year to illicit financial flows (UNECA), while maintaining the world’s lowest tax-to-GDP ratio, averaging just 16%. Using the Futures Wheel, one can map how digital tax reforms strengthen fiscal stability, which in turn enhance public services and deepen citizen accountability. To realise this pathway, African governments must embrace digital taxation, tackle profit shifting, and advocate for a global sovereign debt resolution mechanism that prevents recurrent fiscal crises.
3. Monetise Africa’s natural assets. The continent holds 68% of the world’s phosphate, 55% of cobalt, 78% of palladium, and 60% of solar potential. Yet much of this wealth is still exported as raw commodities. This scenario lens reveals two futures: one where Africa remains trapped in resource dependency, and another where it controls value chains, sets prices for strategic minerals, and anchors global carbon and biodiversity markets. Alternatives include investing in local processing capacity, operationalising carbon and biodiversity credit markets, and enforcing transparency in extractive contracts.
4. Unlock investment, especially intra-African. Today, intra-African foreign direct investment (FDI) makes up just 14% of the total, despite offering returns up to six times higher than the S&P 500. Horizon scanning points to fintech, AfCFTA, and emerging sovereign capital markets as disruptive levers for the future. Policy reforms must therefore focus on mobilising the continent’s $350 billion in pension funds and sovereign wealth, correcting biased international credit ratings, and deepening financial integration under AfCFTA.
5. Leverage diaspora and remittances. In 2024, remittances reached $100 billion, already surpassing aid flows. Yet transfer costs remain 7.4%, more than double the SDG target of 3%. With a backcasting approach, one can imagine a 2040 future where remittances are Africa’s largest, cheapest, and most stable source of development finance. To move toward this future, African governments should consider issuing diaspora bonds, reducing remittance transfer costs, and designing “talent circulation” policies that turn skilled migration into a strategic development tool.
Together, these five pathways will shape concrete steps toward a post-aid financial architecture for Africa and beyond. If acted upon with foresight, they can transform today’s aid cuts into tomorrow’s sovereignty dividend.
The collapse of aid flows is not the end of Africa’s story. It is the beginning of a new chapter. Sevilla provided the political starting point; foresight provides the compass to 2040. Expanding the domestic resources, natural assets, investment, and diaspora, Africa can ensure that the aid crisis is remembered not as a cliff-edge, but as the launchpad for financial sovereignty. The future of aid in Africa is not about aid at all – its about stepping into a new future for Africa.
© Mohamed Okash, 2025
Mohamed Okash is a researcher and ecosystem builder specializing in social innovation, policy development, and institutional and human capital development. He employs strategic foresight to anticipate emerging challenges and craft transformative solutions for climate resilience and socioeconomic transformation in least-developed countries. As the founding director of the Institute of Climate and Environment (ICE) and a member of the Global Future Council on Nature and Climate at the World Economic Forum, Mr. Okash leads initiatives that shape sustainable and equitable futures.