Doing More with Less: Rethinking European Development Cooperation in a New Age

Masood Ahmed: Good morning to you, and welcome to this event on Doing More with Less. If there's one theme running through this week already is that the whole development cooperation enterprise is going through a transformation. We are in Washington, so there's obviously a lot of focus on what's been happening here in the US. This is the spring meeting of the IMF and the World Bank.

There's a lot of focus on what does this transformation mean for those organizations, but it's important to remember that the development cooperation programs, not just in the US, but across most of the bilateral agencies, donor countries in Europe, elsewhere are also going through, have been going through a change that is more than incremental in you. Step back and look at it.

What we want to spend the next hour on is to do a little bit of a deep dive, looking at what's been happening with some of the major European programs, how they see the leaders of the programs in those countries, see the prospects for development cooperation going forward. We'll make sure that there's enough time also in the hour to get your perspectives, your questions, if you have any, but before we get to your questions, I have a terrific panel. I want to actually go to them first. I'm going to start from the other end, so work back towards us.

Heidy Rombouts sitting at the far end, Director General of Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Aid at the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Next to Heidy, we've got Nick Dyer, who's the permanent secretary at the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office in the UK, and a veteran of development cooperation for many, many years. Nick and I used to have the opportunity to work together at one point.

Next to Nick, we've got Antón Leis García, who is the director of the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation and will be hosting also Spain as you know, FFD. We'll come back a bit to FFD and what we might expect from the Finance for Development Conference in Sevilla later this year. Then close to me is Mikaela Gavas. Needs no introduction within CGD or to any of the people in this room. Mikaela, of course, is the managing director of CGD in Europe and has been leading a lot of our work on European Development Cooperation.

Let me start. Heidy and Nick, I want to ask both of you the same question. In both cases in Belgium, in the UK, the development assistance budgets are being cut back with other priorities that the government has. In the UK, there's been two rounds of cuts. One that happened a few years ago, second round starting now, bringing down the UK development assistance program from 0.7 to 0.5, now 0.3 at one point. Of course, the GDP is rising, so that's not quite the same, but still it's a very big cut. Heidy, for you in Belgium, if I understand correctly, there's an agreement to bring this down over three years by 25% for development cooperation budget.

Obvious thing, obviously, is how do you manage these cuts, what will this mean, but it's more than just the cuts. There's also a change in the nature of development cooperation. I want to ask for you to say quick cut experiment. Let's fast forward five years, we're in 2030. If you were to then look at your development cooperation programs in 2030 and then compare them with what you have today, how would you think they're going to be different? What will change? Besides the fact that they'll be smaller, what else? Maybe Heidy, if I start with you first, so I come to Nick.

Heidy Rombouts: Thank you very much. I'm opening my crystal ball here and trying to look into it very deeply and peek and see maybe three things that I can see. First thing, and I think very much connected to the title of this event, is to do more with less. I have been saying to many of our partners that we will probably have to be brave and say that we will start doing less with less. I think this less with less is more about priorities.

Of course, the more with less is also about poverty reduction, the global public goods agenda, the mutual beneficial partnerships. I think we will have to focus and center more, prioritize. I think that is also a discourse that we've been hearing probably decades already, that we need to prioritize. I think we have to acknowledge that as a community, we have found that extremely difficult because we see that layers of layers of complexity and the intersectionality of these layers with poverty have become so important, and we want to be holistic and really take everything on board.

Now, what I see, and what is being articulated in the first documents of the Belgian government as well, and the minister of foreign affairs, which is now also taking up the mandate of minister of development cooperation, is that we indeed center around these global public goods. I know you can look at it from a critical perspective, but at the same time, I'd like to underscore this intersectionality of these different topics. There's three themes that really come out.

First is climate and sustainable food systems. There is a huge intersectionality and an interconnection with poverty. Second is stability, and we know from data that rising inequalities are the major element contributing to instability. Stability is in all of our interest. Finally, global health.

Now, the global health agenda for Belgium also is connected and climate as well has also a connection with what we can offer and what is our expertise. I think we see all these things coming together. We need to work on things that are mutually beneficial. What I see in the future is that we will also be challenged as development partners to come up with better offers to demonstrate the mutual beneficial interest for ourselves and our partners in a joint effort, and really flip that dynamic, indeed of one-sided offer and demand.

I think, again, that is a discourse that we have been hearing for decades, but I think we will now have to really define it and see what it can be, how it can be operationalized, and I give one example where I think we're on the right track. We have a partnership with the African CDC and Europe, for example, in a Team Europe approach on global health because it is also in the interest of Europe that the health system in Africa is strengthened. It is in the interest that there is local production and manufacturing of medical products on the African continent. We want to come in with technology, with private sector really to actually build on that mutual beneficial partnership. I think that is one element that I see.

The second, and those who have seen me in other panels know that, that there is really a thing that we come back to very often and for years now already, is that we really need to work again, refocus again on operational effectiveness. I'm a little bit hesitant sometimes on the efficiencies. I think yes, the system is too complex and we can cut back and gain a bit there in terms of efficiency, but I also think we have to be careful because we already have done many efficiency exercises as well. I think we need to be careful also about what we can promise.

However, on the effectiveness side, I think there is still room for manoeuvre. We are very much engaged in the effectiveness exercise with the World Bank, and I think that needs to become a cross-board exercise across all actors.

Finally, for me, I would love to see, and I see it in my crystal ball still as a very gray zone, but I'd love to see in five years' time a much clearer articulation of the private sector. We were together yesterday, but I like the comment that we heard, and it was in my notes so I don't steal it entirely from the speaker yesterday. We have to be clear and clearer on what private sector can do and what it can't and what it won't. There's certain public investments that private sector will not come on board with.

We have that conversation also in Europe. We'd need a clear articulation of private sector as a service delivery and investment. These roles are fundamentally different, and sometimes it's all packaged together. I think that articulation needs clarification in the next five years.

Masood Ahmed: Thank you very much, Heidy. Can I just push back and ask for one piece of clarification? More clarity on the offer, including what it is that we can get from the private sector, what we can't get from the private sector, greater focus on impact, and more selectivity than today. Would you say five years from now, would there be a more simplifica-- You said selectivity and simplification, but we've been talking about selectivity and simplification for as long as most people have been working on this. I don't think we've actually moved in the right direction. Do you think five years from now Belgium will be involved in fewer countries and more simpler projects, or you think that's going to be hard to do?

Heidy Rombouts: What I think probably we have to bring back on board is the notion sometimes also of division of labor. We have both from agency sides as from development partners side trying to position ourselves in so many fields. I think in Belgium, what I now see is indeed we need to focus on fewer items. For us now there's climate stability and health. Yes, we will have to make tough choices to say like-- and this is not to say that it is not important, and this is not to say that we think that partners who we have been funding, that they have done a bad job. It is just that with the means that we have, we cannot focus on that anymore, and we will prioritize A, B, C, D, but maybe we can do, again, a better mapping.

I also think that bilaterals and multilaterals, for example, need to come to a better understanding of where is the added value of who. For example, regional integration projects, maybe on the African continent, the African Development Bank should lead on that topic, maybe not a bilateral partner or a bilateral agency. I think we need more clarity there.

Masood Ahmed: Thank you. Nick, same question for you. Obviously, you're going to be smaller, but that kind of forced you to think about your footprint of program. How do you see five years from now? What's different?

Nick Dyer: You're right, Masood. We have made the decision to cut to 0.3 by '27, '28. This is going to be a gliding path; it's not immediate. We've done it with regret, not because of ideology. The expectation is that we will go back up again in the future. Now, you asked us to do a thought experiment, think about five years ahead. I think we should do a slightly different thought experiment, which is what would you do if you had no aid at all? How would you do development in a non-aid world? I'm not saying that we are going to be in a non-aid world. Let me just make that absolutely--

Masood Ahmed: I'm wondering why we were doing it. Go ahead.

Nick Dyer: Let me make that absolutely clear, but I think it is worth asking yourself. If you were to zero base, what would you do? My answer to that question would be four things. The first thing we would do is think about how do we make the most of the membership organizations and the balance sheets that we are already a member of. Because we're a member of the IFIs, how would we maximize the capital adequacy frameworks of the banks to extract more finance from the existing balance sheets that we've got? How would we use our guarantee facilities more?

Over the next five years, we will be giving probably up to $4 or $5 billion worth of guarantees. It's not aid, but we're still financing. How would we use our development finance institution differently to make sure that, or to encourage them to take more risks and do things differently? It would force you to innovate with the memberships that you've got.

The second is, what have we learned over the last 30 years and how can we make the most of what we've learned? How do we bring knowledge and how do we unlock the knowledge that we've got to help the countries who basically have got their own resources now? A lot of countries want to exit from development. How do we unlock knowledge and how do we get that knowledge working?

The third would be, what can we do with our own policies? Trade. There's a big debate around trade, trade preferences, tariffs, elicit finance. City of London is part of the problem as well as part of the solution to illicit finance. Global taxation in terms of how you get taxes or how you can get markets moving, so carbon markets. How would you start thinking in different ways?

Then finally, because we're a merged organization, how would you unlock the foreign in our Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office to work more closely with the development? How do you bring to bear your foreign policy leavers to address things like conflict? It's not just a development issue, it's a combined question. That's the starting point. We need to do all of that. If we think that's what we would do without any aid, I think we should do all of that at the same time.

We're still working this through, so we don't know what the final answer will be, but I think we will see four shifts in the UK approach to development. Building on what I've just said, the first is we will be less of a donor and more of an investor. We will look to do more leverage, leveraging balance sheets, leveraging the private sector, scaling our development finance institution to the extent that we can, so be more of an investor rather than the donor.

The second is when we were a 0.7 donor, we did service delivery at scale. We bought results. We can't afford that anymore. We're going to exit service delivery and we're going to do more supporting systems, helping countries develop their own systems, spend their own money, and spend their own money well. The third is that we will shift from grant giving to information exchange. How can we unlock the expertise that is available in the city of London through our regulators, our advisory capabilities, our service industries in the UK? The UK is a service economy. How can we unlock that and bring that knowledge to bear in creating the right systems and institutions across the world?

Finally, we will shift from doing international charity to working through local systems and trying to do localization more. Now, I very much agree with Heidy. There'll be a lot more emphasis on mutual interest. There'll be a lot more focus on fewer areas just because we can't afford to spread ourselves widely. I think we will have a bilateral program, but it'll be much narrower. I don't think we can afford to have the breadth of bilateral engagement that we've got. You will see us narrowing both in terms of thematically and geographically over the next five years.

Masood Ahmed: Leveraging, as an investor, all these other things that you talked about the private sector, and city of London.

Nick Dyer: Indeed. The reality, people talk a lot about private sector and how do you get the private sector moving. It's partly about risk and the private sector's attitude to risk and how you can cover some of the risk, but it's also about creating the right environment for the private sector. You've got to work on knowledge and institutions as well as the capital side.

Masood Ahmed: Nick, this is a very nice, clear vision. UK's been a big actor in supporting fragile states. I'm wondering how this vision transposes into the fragile states, sub-universe, if you like. It'd be harder to get those other actions leveraged out there. What do you think about that?

Nick Dyer: If you start from a zero-aid world, then what do you then start doing when you've got aid, when you start building back? The question we ask ourselves is, where do you put the concessionality? Ideally, you don't want to be in a world where one pound in, one pound out, because that's not leverage. We do want to leverage, but there clearly are places where the private sector is not going to go. There are clearly places that still need some service delivery support. There are lots of places where we are going to do humanitarian support, that requires grant giving.

For us, the deepest concessionality should go to the places where it needs it most, which are basically the poorest countries and the most fragile countries. As countries get richer, your degree of concessionality that you offer reduces and the instruments and tools that you provide and you engage in those countries will start shifting. Middle-income country, you'll be providing potentially blended finance, guarantees, technical assistance, but not high degrees of concessionality.

Masood Ahmed: Right, and trade. You said trade become bigger and bigger.

Nick Dyer: Trade, yes.

Masood Ahmed: Antón, it's a somewhat more comfortable position than your two colleagues for the moment in the sense that, at least for now, I don't hear anything about Spain wanting to cut back its development budget. If anything, they're talking about increasing defense, but also sustaining development cooperation, but I presume you are also not, five years from now, going to have the same program you have today. What's your sense of how the evolution is going to happen?

Antón Leis García: Thank you for saying that I'm in a more comfortable position, but I think, unfortunately, I'm not. Nobody is, because if you look at all the figures, even from two years ago, like 220 billion a year, that's still 5% of the SDG needs. Sure, I'm not in the short-term pressure of undertaking major cuts, but it would be very silly for any of us. By the way, I think Nick alluded to this. There are some countries that are undertaking cuts because of some shift in policy priorities or ideology. There are others that are doing it because of fiscal conditions.

I do not know where we will be in 2030. We are saying the budget will be smaller in 2030. I'm not necessarily sure. What I know, we know, and there are some projections that 2025, 2026, '27 are going to be tough, but if you look at the ODA figures released by the OECD last week, we are going to the level where we were in 2020. My concern with these budget cuts of the system as a whole is not necessarily that we would do less with less, which I think, and I echo Heidy's point about doing more with less, there are some limits to that, and everybody that is doing development and us that are doing a major reform of our development system know this because we are reforming.

My concern is that we will do worse. That we will come out with a system that has more fragmentation, smaller projects, worse coordination when it comes to a humanitarian aid, that we go back to 20, 30 years into handing rice bags instead of building on everything that we have learned. We are very concerned about the global health system. At the moment, too, massive progress, and this needs to be told. It's a system that has worked very well and has delivered major results in terms of combating diseases, in terms of safe childbirth, and so on. My concern is that with these cuts, if we do not organize and coordinate, we risk having a worse system.

What is it that we are doing in Spain? Indeed, as you say, we are increasing our budget. There is a few of us. Again, there is this tendency to overstate sometimes these moments of pessimism, the bad news, but there are some countries, and some of them, ODA donors or OECD DAC members, others. Turkey is increasing its development cooperation. They're not a DAC member, but they are very present. Anybody that has been traveling to Sub-Saharan Africa, we see Turkey very present. I think that's good news.

We are seeing some DAC donors like us, like the Koreans, that are increasing their budgets. In our case, I wish we could do more. Indeed, yesterday, our prime minister announced a major increase in defense spending. We will reach 2% of GDP this year, but he said he had a plan on four points. The fourth point is saying, "We are not going to cut on social spending at home, and we are not going to cut on development cooperation and investing in multilateralism because we see this policy as crucial in making a safer world as well."

I think we are going to see more of that, and it's not very different to what colleagues have been saying. We are going to work much more with our political arm, our diplomacy as well. We need to reduce humanitarian needs. That means investing more in peace and conflict prevention. That means also climate resilience, disaster risk preparedness, this kind of thing.

If I look at what we would be doing five years from now, I would say we will be working differently. We will be working less alone on our own programs and projects. We are going to be in more partnerships with the private sector. That's fundamental, not just as a source of finance. I think, frankly, if one looks at this and the billions and the trillions, it's obvious that we have failed miserably. We need to learn the lessons. We need to see how we engage meaningfully the private sector, and that means finance, but it also means expertise. That means a number of things.

I would say we need to work much more on the narratives. This is no longer about one-sided conversations. We need to listen much more to our partner countries. I think I can use also the discussion on global health, the disappearance of PEPFAR, and what is happening with the different actors in global health. Part of the response is not going to come from many of us or of our multilateral partners. It's going to come from countries themselves.

I very much like what Nick was saying, relying much more on self-reliance. Sorry for using the word twice, but self-reliance by countries. They are ready to do it. They want to do it. What they want to have is meaningful conversations, win-win conversations with us, and see what it is that we can do to help them. We will be talking about FFD. We need to go beyond ODA. ODA is too little. It really doesn't matter whether you increase by 100%, which is more or less what we have done with the budget of my agency over the last three, four years, or you need to cut 25%. It is still too little. Spain needs to do more. We are still at 0.25%.

The question is, how do we use that money smartly, and how do we unlock private investment, how we do much more on taxation? Four or five years ago, we were doing very little. Now we are working, and you know that we work with middle-income countries quite a bit, Latin America. We need to help these countries to collect more taxes. We have experience, by the way. It's not just about our technical assistance. It's also the knowledge that Spain did in the '80s, '90s, increasing 1%, 1.5% of GDP, our tax ratio.

Working more with others, more partnerships, I would say. Working on narratives and working on the mode or the modalities will be a bit more different. More investment we are strengthening as part of our reform because we are not just growing, we are trying to get better as well. We are strengthening our financial arm as well within the agency. More reimbursable instruments to work with middle-income countries, which I think are still very crucial for many of the global public goods that we were mentioning.

Masood Ahmed: Great. Thank you very much, Antón. Mikaela, you got three development policy leaders giving their perspective. You've been looking at what's happening across in Europe. I think that narrative we've just heard is similar to what you would get from those who are not on the stage today. From where you see it, what do you see as the risks to this approach, this change? How do you think this is going to play out?

Mikaela Gavas: Masood, let me just zoom out a little bit on this. The reality is that, actually we live in an era of national economic security interests, where we have geopolitics trumping economics, no matter what the costs involved. Actually, this direction of travel is very concerning. What we see happening is development cooperation transitioning back to a very transactional model with an emphasis on, in fact, short-term gains.

We've heard governments reordering their spending priorities to make aid a much more explicit tool of their national security, their commercial and geopolitical interests. In fact, we're going to see, and already seeing, this shift away from grants. Nick spoke about it, towards much more commercial investments, towards national industry promotion, especially as countries engage in this race for critical minerals for supply chains and energy.

I worry that most of the aid industry espouses this win-win narrative, but in actual fact, it's going to be more of a winner-takes-all type of approach. The risks are threefold. Firstly, we revert back to the era of Cold War politics, where supporting authoritarian regimes was done in our strategic interest. These approaches proved largely ineffective in the past, and they're unlikely to succeed in the future.

Secondly, this approach, this self-serving approach actually poses a very big risk to the future of multilateral cooperation, where multilateral efforts are seen as undercutting the national interest. Thirdly, and this is crucial, we will entirely lose any width of public support for development. These arguments of aid in the national interest, these self-serving arguments, they just don't work with the public.

People want to help those that are most in need, especially for basic needs.

I'm very concerned about the direction of travel. What I think is really important, and Antón mentioned it, we need a narrative. We need a clear explanation for why governments spend public money in developing countries. We haven't cracked it. It may be something around the goal of all countries, not just developing countries, but all countries to embark on this path of development self-reliance. It's certainly about building countries' capacities to plan and finance and manage their own development.

Let me just end with a survey that was done by AidData, a recent survey, 2025. This is the Listening to Leaders survey. There were two things that came across very, very starkly from Global South leaders. They want partners to prioritize long-term impact by building their capacities and helping them build their capacities. Then the second thing that they want is they want partners to coordinate much better among themselves and with South-South cooperation providers, with the development finance institutions, with philanthropic actors to reduce this really heavy burden that we continue to place on them.

Masood Ahmed: Great. Now you've certainly raised some of the risks that I hope we'll be able to get into. I think there's an interesting question here. What is it that the public in countries that provide aid, what is the argument that is most compelling for them? You listen to some people who will say, "The argument that we're doing this to help others doesn't really work anymore. We should really say this is mutual interest, self-interest, that's the direction we're moving in."

Survey after survey shows that, actually, the mutual interest argument doesn't seem to work all that well either. It's actually what people want to see is that they are helping others, but that the money they're providing is being used effectively to deliver results. Maybe it's effectiveness and impact rather than the motivation itself. It'd be worth getting a bit your reactions on that.

I think I want to just do one more quick round and then come to you. I want to get your sense on how you see not your own programs, but the multilateral system of which you are all part. Maybe at this time, I'll start with you, Nick. UK has always been big player in supporting the multilateral financial institutions. You're spread over, I think 40 multilateral institutions or the system that you are in. Five years from now, how do you think the multilateral system should change? Do you think that to be part of 40 institutions still, or do you think you need to be selective there also? Do they need to be more selective? What's your vision of that?

Nick Dyer: Before I answer that question, I would fundamentally disagree with the characterization that Mikaela just laid out in terms of how she thinks we're going. Maybe that's the debate to come into. Look, there are 220 multilateral organizations that can receive ODA. We are in 42, so I think we are being pretty selective already. I think the problem is there's been massive proliferation in the international architecture. Whether that's in humanitarian, the climate architecture is a real mess, the economic-financial architecture has grown.

We are part of the problem. We've created huge numbers of trust funds, separate institutions. To be honest, the world in which the resources available for this proliferated architecture is shrinking, there's an opportunity to actually tidy it up. I think that is going to be one of the unintended benefits of the reduced aid is that all of us are really now asking ourselves very seriously what needs to change in the parts of the architecture that we think we still need.

We certainly think there are four parts of the architecture that we absolutely want to reform because we think they're absolutely fundamental. First is humanitarian, because the humanitarian architecture provides support and institutions and logistics that we'd have to either create ourselves, it's more efficient, that architecture, but as we see that the needs have exploded and the resources are going down, it cannot actually deal with what it's doing at the moment. It really does need to prioritize more. It needs to focus more on prevention. It needs to focus more on protection. That's humanitarian architecture.

Climate change, because it's global public good, and you need global collective action to address climate change. Again, the architecture's a real mess. We've got views on which parts of the architecture need to reform, but we think there needs to be a collective conversation around that. The third is global health. Again, another global public good. Health problems in poor countries will wash up on our shores if we don't help build the systems and address the challenges in global health. We saw that with COVID.

Again, there are multiple institutions. We got these two massive global health funds that are seeking replenishments this year, Gavi and the Global Fund. There is a question about whether we should still continue with two big global health funds. Finally, the international economic architecture. We think that we just need to leverage more out of that architecture that currently exists. There's real opportunities to reform all of it.

Masood Ahmed: Thank you, Nick. Heidy, same question, but perhaps a little bit more on the UN side. Lots of agencies all running out of money.

Heidy Rombouts: We have even prioritized more, and of course, we are much smaller. Yes, there is this question on like, how can you focus more? Then again, I come back to that idea of do less with less and the efficiency challenge, but we have already done a number of exercises in terms of where do we focus. I very much agree with Nick that the system is too complicated.

I think probably all of us working in this field, when you talk to a member of family and you start explaining, they're lost. You haven't even finished one-third of your conversation and they're already lost in the architecture, in the funds, et cetera. It is too complicated. There is clutter in the system, and we need to acknowledge that. There is the initiative UN80. I think, again, if we don't grab the opportunity, we'll have to live with the consequences. We either do it ourselves as a community and come up with changes.

Where I see a challenge in this momentum is that if we throw out the baby bit of bath water, and we now leave it up to the current leaders of this world to reconstruct, then we may end up with something that is really not built on the collective intelligence and expertise that we have as a community. I think we really have to start actively engaging. I like the approach of Nick, of cutting it down maybe on a thematic basis rather than looking at the UN structure of and by itself. Very often when I engage in that conversation, they throw back the ball. They say, "Oh, but it's your fault because you as international donors, you call for these trust funds and you call for--"

That is partially true, but let's also be honest. There's also this incredible offer from the different institutions that whenever they see a problem, they come up with a solution.

The solution is we create another trust fund and we throw money at it. Let me share an experience. Belgium has never been member of the pandemic fund. I've had pressure from development partners on why have we not come on board. The reason why we don't come on board is exactly because of this fragmentation. We said, "This is not the way of dealing with pandemics. We know that we need to strengthen the system. It is not a vertical approach to now prevent pandemics." I've had colleagues pointing fingers at me around a table in public saying like, "Oh, and Belgium is still not a member of the pandemic Trust Fund." And so I think we need to move beyond that and to really acknowledge the challenge that is there with this fragmentation.

Very much agree on climate and linking it indeed to the effectiveness. What we tend to do is focus on the input, the funds that we put in, the number of funds that we have is very difficult with climate to actually have an aggregated result in terms of the impact that all these investments have led to. That is also partially because of the structure and the architecture.

Masood Ahmed: Thank you. Antón, a quick word on FfD before we get some questions. What's happening? What do you expect out of this?

Antón Leis García: What's happening I don't know because I'm not involved in the negotiations. The outcome document is, of course, important. What we want is a document that is as ambitious as possible. We are pushing for ambitious. I think what is important is that it's concrete because I think we can have a long discussion among donors, but there are many people in what is called, I don't like necessarily the term, but the global south looking at us and having expectations about what we do, the promises that we made, and we have fulfilled or not fulfilled, and actually more the latter than the former.

I think what I would hope is that in Seville, we look at ODA, but if you look at the draft declaration, ODA is a very small portion, and there is not much novelty there. I would hope that when it comes to international development corporation, Seville is rather the starting point of a conversation to build this new narrative that we all need, that probably our public opinions need. I'm speaking from a country where 80% of the people are supporting what we do, and the Spanish people like solidarity.

I also disagree, Mikaela, that the interest discussion and the solidarity discussion are a zero-sum game. We can do things in our mutual interest. Solidarity is in our mutual interest, I would actually argue. When it comes to Seville, I would say as ambitious as possible a declaration, but also it's an opportunity to have several parallel discussions. The one I would hope in our area is that we start to look at a new narrative on what we do, not just a conversation among donors, a conversation with countries in the South.

When we look at development cooperation, how we can use these valuable resources that we have, ODA, but also what our colleagues do in south-to-south and triangular. Thank you for mentioning it. One of the things we want to do, for instance, Spain with other development agencies from north and south, is to convene all of us and to start sending the message that there are many development agencies in the north and in the south that are working, that are funding development through ODA, but they are sharing knowledge and doing plenty of things for development priorities.

Then, on the other discussions on debt and trade, and so on, hope for the best, but the geopolitical environment is what it is. I do think Seville will be a very interesting, certainly it happens in the most interesting of times for development corporation in many years. I would hope that beyond the discussions of the negotiators, that we also use that opportunity for many of us, whoever has an initiative or something concrete to put forward, to do it. I think there is going to be a platform for action. What we do not want to do is to have Addis, which is an excellent document. It was called the Addis Action Agenda, and it happened in Addis, and there was an agenda like on the action, let's levy vis-à-vis in ourselves. We haven't done much.

Masood Ahmed: Great. Okay. Mikaela, your elaboration of risks is clearly triggered. Any quick reaction to that before I turn to the people?

Mikaela Gavas: Yes, so I don't actually see solidarity and mutual interest as juxtaposed. In fact, solidarity is absolutely in our national interest as well. I was outlining the direction of travel that I see unfolding in terms of the geopolitical environment we're living in. Let me just take you back to the early '90s. Australia's foreign minister at the time, Gareth Evans, he put forward this notion of what he called good international citizenship. Basically, he was trying to espouse this notion that a state that cares about other people's suffering and does everything in its power or reasonably possible to alleviate it is essentially a good international citizen.

He argued that good international citizenship is both a moral imperative and a matter of hardheaded national interest. He was saying essentially that although it's the primary business of any country's foreign policy to advance and protect the national interest, policymakers think about the national interest only in terms of security strategic and physical, and prosperity, trade and investments and so on.

There needs to be this third element, which is really about this good international citizenship. It was interesting when he talked about the returns. Okay, this is where it resonates today. The returns are number one, progress on issues requiring collective international action that might not otherwise be achievable. Number two, reciprocity. If I take your problem seriously, you're that much more likely to help me solve mine. It's the third one which is the most important, and it's reputational, a country's general image, how it projects itself, its culture, its values, its policies, and how it is in turn seen by others. This is actually of fundamental importance in determining how well it succeeds in advancing and protecting its national interests.

Masood Ahmed: Thank you very much for reminding us. There you call it soft power now, but in some ways, it's so linked to how you are seen to be a responsible international player. Now's a very good time to talk about it. Let's get three quick comments from the floor, and we may or may not have time for our panelists to come back and do it. I would jump from the front there, lady in the back there, and then right here. Four. Let's do four, and then we'll come back, please.

Audience Member 1: Great. Thanks. I'm John Coonrod with The Movement for Community-led Development. When we have surveyed a zero ODA world, we think it's really important to go back to basics, and say, how can local communities thrive because almost every country's constitution assigns basic human need fulfillment to local communities, and yet countries are very top-down, they're very centralized. How do you see the next 10 years shifting that, shifting more resources, power, and self-reliant local resource mobilization to local communities?

Masood Ahmed: Thank you. I think back there. We've got a microphone. Coming up.

Audience Member 2: Thanks to you, the moderator, and all of you panelists. I'm Isabelle Pelly from GiveDirectly, which is an organization dedicated to providing unconditional cash transfers to people living in extreme poverty. We've heard from all of you around prioritization, simplification, greater efficiency and effectiveness. Some of you may be aware that cash transfers are a highly efficient and evidenced approach to addressing a number of the priorities you've listed. Addressing a range of acute humanitarian needs, including in fragile and conflict-affected states, climate adaptation, resilience, sustainable food systems, et cetera.

At this critical juncture, I would argue they're perhaps one of the most of simple and effective mechanisms for concessional wealth redistribution whilst contributing to local economies and therefore potentially helping leverage that additional financing. I'm just curious to hear what role you see for cash transfers in your respective approaches for prioritization and simplification. Thanks.

Masood Ahmed: That's a very good question. We think conditional or unconditional cash transfers going to go up or down over the next five years if you think about your program. I think the third one was over here, and then we're going to lady in the back there. Fourth. Yes.

Audience Member 3: Hi. Thank you for a great session. I'm Otis with OVB Ventures. A few years ago, I used to design and build for the State Department, the GIST network that became the global flagship entrepreneurship program and an example of soft power. The topic is doing more with less. My question is around how can we work closer with the local entrepreneurship ecosystem so that we can engage the local entrepreneurial community so they become the owners and solvers of some of the key problems in health care, education, economic development, and others?

Masood Ahmed: Great. Thank you. The lady over there.

Audience Member 4: Thank you so much. I'm Carmen Paun. I'm a global health reporter at POLITICO here in the DC area. Obviously, my question is on global health. I wanted to ask Nick, your idea of the two big funds that are replenishing this year, and whether they need to continue separately. Can you develop a bit more on that? Do you see them eventually merging at some point or one kind of disappearing? Where do you see that going?

Then on the World Health Organization, obviously, they are cutting down their restructuring as a result of the US withdrawal and funding cuts. When there was a threat of that in 2020, there was the expectation that many European countries would step in and help. Obviously, this is not happening now for all the reasons that you laid out, but I was wondering, is the WHO something that your countries still think it's worth investing, looking into potentially upping funds or helping them out in some other ways, like withstand the shock from the US withdrawal and funding cut? Thank you.

Masood Ahmed: Great. Thank you. The gentleman behind you. So we'll-- there first.

Audience Member 5: Yes, thank you very much. I'm working for the French Development Agency. Thank you much for the great panel. Europe Department represent, I guess, twice US efforts in terms of dependent finance until recently. Do you think that the current context is an opportunity for Europe to speak with a different voice? If so, what should be the different voice of Europe in this current context?

Masood Ahmed: What is the voice of Europe? Last one here, and then I'll come back to you.

Sara Casadevall Belles (CGD): There are many questions online, and lots of them are around international coordination and provider coordination. One of the questions is, how are European providers coordinating amongst themselves to improve the effectiveness and the efficiency of ODA?

Masood Ahmed: Thank you. That's very helpful to get that. All right. I'll come back to you. Don't attempt to answer all questions necessarily unless you have compelling reasons to. Pick and choose the ones that you would like to respond to quickly, please. Thank you. I'll start with you, Heidy.

Heidy Rombouts: I'm then the first one to pick and choose. On the unconditional cash transfers, we've actually worked with that in Belgium. I acknowledge the interesting approach there, and we also have some researchers working on it. I would really like to call, and this is a call, let's say, to us collectively as a community, to really, this is the momentum to bring out all the good experiences and the proof of concept and the impact of it. Where I see a challenge, and this is not my personal opinion, but where I see a challenge with the unconditional cash transfers is indeed on the, let's say, the relationship that we have to create, also on the mutual beneficial interest.

Because it is very much, and I'm tying it back to the different notions, on the solidarity, yes, and so then we have to prove that this is contributing to actually climate resilience, that this is contributing to stability. And so I think there is some work to do there. For us also to enable our political decision makers to take it on board more consistently, I would argue. It's a warm invitation from my end on deepening that.

The entrepreneurship, and I'm going to link that to the conversation, also on the division of labor. What I'm sometimes confronted with in my current role is that the actors that we work with closely, they sort of see a gap within a continuum of needs and a continuum of instruments and a continuum of things that we actually have to work on. I'm telling them, with the Belgian Development Corporation, I cannot cover the full spectrum, but we have to identify who is good at what. What I think is, for example, we have a DFI in Belgium that is specifically looking at small entrepreneurship, at SMEs. This is not necessarily IFC, but again, this is the continuum.

No, at the Belgian level, not even at European level, we will be able to cover the full spectrum, but we have to come to, I believe, a common understanding and then focus also better on who does what and where do we put the focus. For me maybe on the European side and the European voice and the European coordination, I think there is this whole notion also of Team Europe, and so we are very much actively working on that. At the same time, we also have a conversation, again, on do we all focus as European member states on the same thing, on the Team Europe, or again, do we also have a division of labor. Because we also have an interest, maybe, on diversifying our engagements with different countries.

I think there is value in both. Again, let's not over-focus on one approach and throwing out the other. At the same time, I think, as Europe, we have work to do also because it's not necessarily that all European member states are converging on all of these topics and matters, and that in itself, I believe, is also a challenge that we should not ignore.

Masood Ahmed: Thank you.

Nick Dyer: Three quick responses, Isabelle. Cash transfers, big fan, great evidence. There will be more of it in humanitarian and climate response. That said, it's not the answer to everything. You do not address the structural rigidities that drive poverty in countries through cash transfers. It can help, but you've got to address other things. I often hear people say cash transfers is the answer to everything. It's not.

International coordination. My European colleagues can say more about Europe. The thing I would guard against is us saying that it's all about the traditional partners. We've got to work with Turkey, we've got to work with India, we've got to work with the Gulf. There's a lot of new players out there. That could lead to fragmentation. We do need to work with them more closely than we are. We don't talk about them enough, and we don't see them enough on our conversations. We just need to engage more with those.

Carmen, on global health, look, no one can substitute for the US. It was just so big. We are and will remain a big supporter of the WHO. We made a £310 million commitment of all flexible funding. We will have to review, as we are everything else, the affordability of that, but we will stay engaged with WHO. On the global funds, I threw that out as a question, not necessarily as a solution, but I think we should ask ourselves some questions around who should be funding global health systems. What are the back-office coordination that you could do more effectively? What can you do with the governance? What can you do with the operational model of these funds? I think now is the moment, as we are asking ourselves about reforming the international system, to go back to basics and challenge ourselves about whether we got that model right.

Masood Ahmed: Thank you.

Antón Leis García: Two ideas on localisation. I think it's important. It is a question of cash transfers. I would say certainly, we will see more of that in the humanitarian side. Very important. Actually, I would not like to see in the new humanitarian system or after the humanitarian reset less reliance on multipurpose cash transfers. They are great. They are very efficient. Are they life-saving, all of the components? That's the tricky part, but we should be able to preserve that. On development cooperation, what I would say is a focus more on building the systems, the fiscal capacity, and having these schemes rather than having donors funding the cash transfers themselves.

On opportunities for Europe, certainly this is a time of opportunity, not just for Europe, for everyone. There are voids that are being left open, and it would be for people to seize them. Do I see an opportunity for Europe? Sure. Will we be able collectively as the EU, or as Europeans, including the UK, will we be able to fill that void? It's up to us. What I can tell you is that certainly, as Spain, we are seeing major countries in what is called the global south, we need to engage and work with, and we are ready to build those partnerships, more humbly if it is just us, more broadly if it is with the EU.

This is crucial and it's important because this is no longer about donors in the north. The future needs to be much more on a true partnership. On improving coordination, absolutely yes. We need to improve our coordination in capitals, but where we should improve coordination is on the ground. Again, I mentioned this before. There is the country platforms. I believe there is one or two country platforms that have been created worldwide. Let's engage much more because that allows another big principle of the effectiveness agenda that we are forgetting sometimes, which is appropriation. We need our partner countries in the driving seat, and I think they are the best coordinators, actually, to have them really telling us what they need and who is best at doing that.

Masood Ahmed: Thank you very much, Antón. Mikaela, final thoughts?

Mikaela Gavas: Yes, just very quickly, three things. I think bilateral agencies, going forward, need three things. One, clear a mandate which is much more honest about what the agency is trying to achieve and what it's best placed to actually tackle. Secondly, a much clearer way to communicate development impact to the public. Well, actually not only to the public, but to national assemblies, to parliamentarians as well. This will help you safeguard your ODA budgets.

Frankly, if people believe that ABE works, they are much more likely to support international development efforts. Then the third thing is really a focus on coordination and cooperation, it's been said, but not only between countries and agencies, and so on. Within countries, and especially between the agencies and the development finance institutions where there is a general lack of coordination.

Masood Ahmed: Great. Thank you. We've ran out of time. I do want to say one thing, which is just picking up on this last point about coordination. This is a moment where if you talk to any bilateral or multilateral agency leader, they're saying they're going through process of change and transformation inside their organization that is multiple steps up from their normal base of change. We're always changing and evolving, but right now, everybody is going through a fast-forward accelerated process of change. I don't hear as often as you would expect a discussion of learning from each other's experiences of that change process right now. I think there's a huge payoff.

In Europe, in the EU, you have a structure that enables you to do that. The UK has got connections with both Europe and outside. With the multilaterals and the development finance institutions, the lines of communication are uneven historically, both at the country level and globally. I think one thing that I take away from this is that at the moment, whatever you as leaders can do to promote and facilitate that, and whatever thinktanks like CGC and others can do to bring together the opportunities for people within these organizations to share and learn from their respective experiences right now would have a big payoff.

That's a lesson we'll take away, see if we can find any ways to help. Thank you all for being here. Thank you for those that have been online. Let's thank our panelists for their contribution.