Official Development Assistance – ODA

A flow provided by official organisations (state, regional and local governments) aimed at countries that appear on the Development Assistance Committee’s list of recipients and which advocates the development of a series of concessional-based criteria.

The said flow can be carried out directly with recipient countries or via multi-lateral development institutions intended for those countries, giving rise to different ways of channelling aid.

(*) Annotation on data: ODA’s disaggregated figures presented publicly by the Development Assistance Committee from the Organisation for Economic Development Cooperation normally have a two-year delay.

Therefore, apart from the general aid numbers, which the Development Assistance Committee published in preliminary data from 2019, to be presented in the 2020 Report, the rest of the figures analysed in their Chapter II — and with the corresponding sectoral disaggregation — run up to 2019.

Bilateral aid

“Bilateral aid” is understood as the ODA which Spanish cooperation provides directly to member countries. Actions are managed through different instruments and by different governmental, local and civil society authorities in member countries via Technical Cooperation Offices belonging to the Spanish Agency of International Development Cooperation and the administration of Spain’s Regional Communities, in many cases through NGDOs, universities or Spain’s public study centres. Bilateral ODA encompasses, in the strictest sense, financing for the following kinds of aid: programmes, technical cooperation, investment projects and other resources.

Multibilateral aid

Multibilateral or bilateral ODA channelled via Multilateral Development Organisations is understood as financing which, through this MDO channelling, enables the financing unit/agent to have a greater capacity for geographical specification and/or sectoral distribution, in addition to monitoring, given they are contributions mainly intended for programmes and/or projects. It is relatively commonplace for these data to be included in bilateral ODA.

However, in the 2020 Report the aim is to present disaggregated data in the three channels in order for it to be read with an appreciation as close as possible to reality.

Multilaterall aid

Financing for development channelled through multilateral organisations which, in principle, is hard to specify in terms of its geographical and/or sectoral destination given that a common fund is incorporated with all donors and then used by multi-lateral institutions to develop their mission.

This type of financing responds to “core funding” or unmarked contributions and contributions to the budget of the European Commission and European Development Fund.