Russia’s war in Ukraine is straining Europe’s commitment to international aid and climate action, Bill Gates has said, as he warned that the world is on track to miss almost all of the UN Sustainable Development Goals its leaders committed to hit by 2030.
“This is the toughest set of challenges global development has faced,” the co-chair of the world’s largest private philanthropic organisation told the Financial Times, adding that he hoped that UK prime minister Liz Truss’s new government would not make further cuts to the overseas aid budget.
Collectively, EU countries contribute almost half of all official development assistance. Gates acknowledged that the costs of donor countries’ coronavirus pandemic response had made navigating the internal politics of international aid harder. But “the Ukraine war, I’d say, is even worse” because of Europe’s outsized spending in areas from food security to gender equality, he said.