Paris, 9 October 2024- With just a few days to go before Parliament examines the 2025 Finance Bill, Coordination SUD is organising an information and discussion forum for NGOs and journalists on the government's plan to cut the Official Development Assistance (ODA) budget once again, threatening international solidarity initiatives and making the living conditions of the populations most vulnerable to crises, poverty, inequality and climate change more precarious.

‘At a time when many crises are worsening and overlapping, international solidarity deserves more than ever to be preserved. It is France's commitment, a matter of social justice, a question of humanity and quite simply of common sense’. This is the message hammered home by Coordination SUD, the national platform of 180 French international solidarity NGOs.

In 2021, members of parliament unanimously adopted a policy and programming law to ensure that France increases its official development assistance each year to 0.7% of its gross national income. This is a strong and necessary commitment, repeated and reaffirmed on numerous occasions by the President of the Republic on the international stage: in June 2023, before numerous Heads of State and Government at the Summit for a New Global Financial Pact in Paris, and again on 25 September at the United Nations. France, through Emmanuel Macron, called for a ‘choice of public financing’ for development. This is also the message conveyed today by 66% of French people who say they support France's action to help vulnerable populations.

Yet, for the second time in less than a year, the ODA budget has found itself the scapegoat for budget cuts.

In February 2024, the ODA budget was cut by 13% of its appropriations for the current year, and there is a risk that it will be cut again in the 2025 Finance Bill, where it could lose more than 30% of its budget compared with the initial Finance Act for 2024 and the resources committed in 2023.

The victims of this measure will primarily be the most vulnerable populations. ‘In particular, ODA enables local and international NGOs to work on a daily basis with and for the most vulnerable,’ points out Olivier Bruyeron, President of Coordination SUD.

For example, the €2 billion cut in the ODA budget is equivalent to :

• 2,000 projects run by associations for vulnerable people (an average of €1 million in subsidies from the Agence française de développement ;
• Access to water for hundreds of thousands of families;
• School support for more than 17 million children;
• Immunisation coverage for 71 million children. 

Coordination SUD and NGO members of the collective will be welcoming journalists who would like to find out more about the consequences of this new cut and the instruments of fiscal justice that would enable the State to collect €6 billion in additional revenue to support ODA, without affecting household budgets or the activity of SMEs! 

Programme : 

• The impact of budget cuts on the living conditions of people around the world
• International solidarity: a duty and a political and legislative commitment
• Financing international solidarity through greater social and fiscal justice: tax on financial transactions and tax on airline tickets
   

Date: Tuesday 15 October from 9.15am to 10.45am - coffee welcome from 9am

Venue: Maison du Crowdfunding KissKiss BankBank - 34 rue de Paradis - 75010 Paris

Metro: Gare de l'Est, Poissonnière or Bonne Nouvelle

Please confirm your attendance with our press contact 

Marie-Pierre Liénard, [email protected]