What foreign assistance myths and facts reveal about how aid really works

Foreign aid is often discussed in very simple terms: It either “works” or it doesn’t. In practice, the reality is more complex. 

For starters, foreign aid (or overseas development assistance/ODA if you want to get technical) covers everything from emergency supplies in the middle of a crisis to long-term investments in healthcare, education, and economic development. Because the term is so wide-reaching, sweeping claims about its effectiveness, cost, and benefits can miss the bigger picture. 

Here, we take a look at a few of the most common myths about foreign aid, and the facts behind the figures.

This is something we’ve heard a lot, especially in the last year. But it’s actually a hard statement to back up. Saying that foreign aid doesn’t work, full stop, tends to lump a number of issues together: confusing emergency humanitarian aid with long-term development assistance, assuming that corruption cancels out all impact, expecting aid alone to solve poverty, focusing solely on failures, or treating imperfect outcomes as proof of total failure. 

However, foreign aid isn’t a magic solution to poverty and all of its causes. While many of these issues are very real and need to be addressed, they also don’t cancel out the impact of the work that is done. 

There are plenty of case studies that point to the success of foreign assistance, but let’s take a look at one key issue: child survival, specifically survival rates for children before their fifth birthday. This is a critical period of development and one where many children lose their lives due to illness, malnutrition, or inadequate antenatal and birth support. 

Since 1990, what public health experts call the under-five mortality rate has fallen by 60% – as have the total number of deaths in children under the age of five. In 2024, that meant over 8 million lives saved. Immunisations alone prevent between 4 and 5 million deaths each year, and many of those lives saved are children who wouldn’t have access to vaccinations without programmes funded by foreign aid. 

Many ODA-supported programmes are designed to promote proven solutions to under-five mortality, including immunisations, access to quality antenatal services, skilled birth attendants, and nutrition support for pregnant and lactating women and children. These solutions are simple, but often hard to scale without significant investment. 

ODA supports both large and small projects, some of which can last for years. Organisations leading these projects apply for funding, and getting a grant can sometimes be lengthy as applications are rigorously prepared and go through careful approval processes. 

While these applications and programmes are built on data and facts, they aren’t 100% guaranteed to succeed. As we saw in 2020 with global lockdowns, emergencies can happen with very little warning and have major impacts beyond our control. 

What’s more, NGOs and development agencies aren’t going to be able to keep up with the pace of global crises if we aren’t able to experiment with new solutions to the issues at hand. These experiments are often smaller in scope – pilots to test out a theory with a limited reach and budget – and even if they miss the mark, they often lead to findings that are put towards future, successful solutions. We wouldn’t have the standard treatment for acute malnutrition today if we hadn’t been allowed to experiment with this new system in 2000. 

Unlike many domestic spending categories, ODA must meet internationally agreed-upon criteria set by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (Learn more about the different organisations behind foreign assistance in our explainer.)

Moreover, most people can’t easily access detailed annual evaluations of domestic spending programmes. By contrast, aid agencies, donors, and NGOs are required to publish allocations, audits, and both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Those reports are also subject to multiple layers of oversight. At Concern, we disclose our financials and governance in our annual reports – as required through Ireland’s charity regulatory framework. 

Irish Aid also publishes annual reports, including country-by-country allocations. In addition to parliamentary oversight, Irish Aid’s reports are also submitted to the OECD where they are reviewed for compliance at the EU level. 

While waste and inefficiency can still occur, foreign aid is subject to unusually extensive reporting, auditing, and evaluation requirements compared with many other areas of public spending.

Irish Aid publishes its annual report usually at the end of September or beginning of October, so for this example we’ll look at the most recent reporting, covering 2024. That year, Ireland’s ODA spending was €2.35 billion. 

That may sound like a lot, but it represents just 0.56% of Ireland’s gross national income (GNI) for the year. As Irish Aid notes, some of these costs in 2024 supported Ukrainian refugees seeking asylum in Ireland. Factoring those out, aid that went fully overseas represented just 0.41% of the GNI.

For comparison, in 2024, Irish public expenditure included €3.58 billion on transport, €12.67 billion on debt servicing and EU payments, and €26.99 billion on social protection.

Ireland has made a commitment to spend 0.7% of its GNI on foreign aid each year by 2030. This would mean more than doubling our GNI ratio in 10 years from just over 0.3% in 2020. The approach is designed to ensure that Ireland’s international commitments grow alongside the economy, without locking the country into a rigid fixed-cost model during downturns. A percentage-based target makes aid spending responsive to economic conditions: stronger growth increases the amount spent, while weaker growth reduces it without changing the target itself.

Economists and development experts have criticised some forms of aid for discouraging local production or creating reliance on donors. Those criticisms have helped to drive major changes in how aid programmes are designed and evaluated today. 

Modern development policy increasingly focuses on partnership, local institutions, sustainability, and measurable outcomes rather than indefinite external support. It’s also designed to work with complex situations in countries that have faced protracted crises over the last several decades. 

The image we often have of international aid is of distributions of food assistance and shelter supplies. This is one critical aspect of ODA, providing frontline support to save lives in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. However, modern aid has also increasingly focused on capacity-building and development projects designed to reduce the need for assistance in the future. 

Today, our world is built more on interdependence than dependence. In a globalised society, countries routinely rely on international cooperation and multilateralism for trade, security, energy, finance, and disaster response. Development support is part of a broader picture. 

Beyond being the right thing to do, providing that assistance also has benefits for the Irish public. Some of the biggest pressures facing Ireland today — including the rising cost of living, energy insecurity, and migration pressures — are closely tied to global instability. Preventing crises is often far less costly than responding once those crises escalate into conflict, displacement, or economic disruption, especially at the international level.