The Tragedy of Swedish Development Aid

It is horrible to watch something extremely important and undervalued being slowly undermined, perhaps ultimately destroyed, by people who do not understand it, and do not understand its worth. Including its worth to them.

You would be forgiven for thinking the above was the introductory paragraph to an article about the United Nations. And alas, it could be.

But I am writing about the Swedish development aid system, largely administered by the public agency where I used to work, Sida. It is a system that has been lifted up by international evaluators and commentators as one of the best international aid programs in the world. Today, it is being steadily attacked and diminished, and it could ultimately be dismantled, driven by short-term political decisions that are deeply misguided, working against both Sweden’s best interests, and the world’s.

Before I tell you more about what is happening in Sweden, why these events are so important to the world at large, and why I consider this a tragedy — one that might still be avoided — I need to provide some personal background and explain why I have waited until now to speak out.

Since retiring, I have kept quiet about Swedish development aid

I have kept quiet about all matters related to Swedish development policy since leaving my senior leadership role as a Department Director and a deputy to the Director-General at Sida, from 2018 to 2024. I wanted, and needed, to remain publicly neutral, for several reasons. (If my personal background is uninteresting to you, jump to the next section.)

One, I was loyal to the code of civil service in a democratically steered country: regardless of whether one agrees with a government’s decisions, those decisions are the will of a government whose mandate comes from the people, and one executes those decisions as skillfully and effectively as possible.

This is a habit of mind one retains even after leaving the civil service. Even after retiring, I watched from the sidelines without saying anything. I was deeply skeptical of what I saw and heard regarding Swedish development aid policy and politics. I agreed with many of the concerns I saw former colleagues raising in the Swedish-language media. But I was not yet ready to go on the record with my concerns.

Two, and this was a huge factor: the job I moved to and held during the year 2024 was as CEO of an intergovernmental agency that was itself a recipient of Swedish development aid. Global Water Partnership (GWP) received significant amounts of Swedish funding, from Sida but also directly from the Foreign Ministry itself, which sponsored GWP’s global headquarters in Stockholm under the terms of a multi-country treaty and host country agreement. As the Executive Secretary of the global partnership, and CEO of the Secretariat, I was afforded (by the Swedish Government) status equivalent to that of an ambassador. And I was representing the joint interests of all the governments and institutions involved in our work. Given those circumstances, it was obviously not my role to criticize the development aid policies of any country, especially our host country, Sweden.

In fact, Sweden had founded GWP over thirty years previously in a move widely hailed as both visionary and necessary. Global water security, GWP’s principal mission, is an even bigger issue today. Nonetheless, in late 2024, the Swedish Minister for International Development Cooperation and Foreign Trade abruptly announced that Sweden was withdrawing from the Global Water Partnership. As a result, the GWP secretariat would soon be forced to leave the country, while also downsizing dramatically. (Recently it was announced that the southern African country of Namibia would become GWP’s new host.)

The events surrounding Sweden’s abrupt decision to withdraw from GWP and eject its international secretariat are the third reason I have remained silent up to now. I was concerned that anything I said about Swedish development aid might be interpreted as personal “sour grapes” rather than a reasoned professional opinion.

Enough time has gone by that I now feel able to speak out on these matters, even compelled to do so, in hopes of slowing or reversing a process I see as regrettable and unnecessary. Not that I believe one essay will make much of a difference, but as we say in Swedish, I want to “pull my straw to the stack.” I will also not pretend that my views are completely unaffected by my experience at GWP, as that would be ingenuine. However, I can assure you that my analysis of what is being lost in Sweden, and therefore lost to the world, has remained consistent for several years, since long before I retired from civil service. I had already shared my core concerns privately, with colleagues and with representatives in government, and now I share them publicly.

Here is one more important reason I have remained quiet: I have a lot of friends and colleagues still working at Sida, and they do a fantastic job, under extremely trying circumstances. I do not want my comments to reflect on them in any way — except positively. My concerns are about the direction of government policy and decision-making. From my perspective, the civil servants executing that policy within Sida are doing so with great professionalism and ethical integrity, as they have always done.

What has happened to development aid in Sweden?

Since changing governments in 2022, Sweden has been steadily reducing its overall development aid budget, while also directing that aid money away from the world’s poorest countries and towards other priorities. The most visible of these new priorities include supporting Ukraine (which now receives about 20% of all Swedish aid), promoting the return of immigrants and asylum-seekers to their previous home countries (the government recently asked Sida to study ways to make the acceptance of returnees a condition of getting aid), and using development aid budgets to synergistically promote Swedish business interests in the developing world.

One may or may not agree with those new priorities, but they are being pursued in the context of a zero-sum game, which means they have led to steep cuts elsewhere in the system. In short, more pieces of a steadily shrinking pie are going to support Sweden’s closest neighbors (I believe there should be other ways to finance needed support to Ukraine), or to more directly promote perceived Sweden’s political and economic interests. Other valuable development programs are being sacrificed to this shift, without any serious debate, and the value of what is being lost is not being recognized.

Here is just one important example: Sweden’s historic and visionary programs to support the ability of poorer countries to do medical and scientific research — programs that are in some ways unique, and that have produced very high-impact results, many of value to the whole world, such as the cholera vaccine — have now been cut by nearly 75%. Other aid programs with well-established, long-term positive effects for global development, such as protecting and educating children or promoting women’s health and economic advancement, have been drastically reduced or shuttered completely in countries like Mozambique, Tanzania, Liberia and Bolivia. The list of cuts is long.

The impact of this shift in Swedish development priorities is not as momentous as the sudden and near-complete shutdown of USAID in early 2025, but it is a dramatic change, with global consequences. Sweden may be a small country, but in the development aid space, it has been a recognized global leader, standard-setter, and something of a powerhouse. It was one of very few countries committed to mobiIizing at least 1% of the country’s Gross National Income to support the UN and aid programs for the world’s poor and oppressed, but this long-standing, indeed historic achievement — Sweden was among the first to reach the benchmark — was one of the first things axed by the current government when it took power.

Sweden also had one of the best reputations in the aid business, topping international charts with names like the Principled Aid Index and the Commitment to Development Index, based on many years of building trust with partner organisations and working to place its funds where they could do the most good — with “good” being largely defined by the aid recipients themselves, which is the hallmark of modern, effective aid.

Obviously the Swedish system was not perfect. Doing development aid well is extremely difficult. When you are trying to make a positive difference in places riven by conflict, afflicted by corruption, challenged just to keep fundamental services going, you are not going to score goals every time. You will occasionally stumble into trouble. But Sweden and its development agency, Sida, have maintained a remarkable overall record of quality and impact, over many years, as judged by peer reviews conducted the OECD and other external evaluation processes.

There is a lot of evidence backing up my statements in the last three paragraphs. These are facts. Unfortunately, the Swedish public does not get to hear many facts about development aid these days. For many years Sida received a special budget to fund communication with the public about Swedish development programs and their impact. That special communications budget, which financed outreach programs to schools and other engagement initiatives, was slashed to zero by the current government, early on. From what I can see these days, Sida mostly has to make do with its website, with various “free” channels such LinkedIn and Instagram, and by relying on the social media accounts of its employees.

When Swedish development aid does make the national headlines, it is usually for less-than-positive reasons — e.g., a secret and very shady deal that was made between the Swedish and Somalia governments (a process that bypassed Sida and its ordinary quality-control processes) to secure Somalian cooperation in the process of returning immigrants. Or uproar from civil society for the dramatic cuts they have weathered. Or discontent among Sida staff. Or general management turbulence (the Director-General was recently moved to a different government post). Etc.

Extraordinarily effective and exciting financial guarantees that mobilize investment capital to build renewable energy where it is most needed, or programs that help thousands of small farmers to invest in improving their productivity, or small grants that made it possible for the UN Secretary-General to convene the world’s largest pension funds to engage investors more deeply in sustainable development — these hope-inducing accomplishments simply pass by without any press notice.

Meanwhile, the attacks against Sida and Sweden’s current aid system continue, and the mainstream Swedish media seems strangely cooperative in that regard. Recently, in an opinion piece published prominently in our largest daily newspaper, a well-known aid critic and former ambassador called for closing down Sida completely, declaring its work ineffective, unsalvageable, a systematic failure. The article cited no direct evidence to support this blanket condemnation of one of the world’s most admired aid programs. It claimed, also with no evidence, that all support channeled through civil society organisations (including organisations with religious roots) contributes to corruption. The author based his general critique on the work of a few international economists who are generally critical of development aid (there have always been many of those) and studiously ignored any positive reviews, independent evaluations, or global indices of the kind I referred to above, regardless of their international prominence.

Another high-ranking former Swedish ambassador immediately wrote an excellent rebuttal, full of relevant evidence — but his article was not accepted for publication by the same newspaper, Dagens Nyheter (DN). Instead, the rebuttal-ambassador could only publish his response on a much smaller, independent, web-based news site. DN readers were not given the benefit of even seeing a debate, much less a well-informed counter-argument. They still see only the first article’s headline: “Swedish development aid cannot be saved — close Sida down.”

Sweden is a global champion for democracy, so one might assume that this wave of anti-aid political philosophy is a reflection of Swedish majority opinion. But recent studies of Swedish opinion show that the opposite is true: there is strong support among the Swedish people for development aid that helps others in need and assists poor nations to build their capacities. In fact, that support has been rising in recent years, not declining.

I could continue to elaborate at great length on the sad topic of “what is happening” to Swedish development aid, because the changes — and from my perspective, the profound losses — have been many. But let us turn to why I believe this to be a tragedy in the making, both for Sweden, and for the world.

What Sweden — and the World — is Losing

Obviously, former recipients of Swedish development aid are losing out. Not so obviously, Sweden itself is also losing something very valuable, something not often associated with development aid.

Power.

“Soft power” is not as popular as it used to be. “Hard power” is in: militaries and their weaponry. The offensive use of hard power is not usually a game that small countries can win, though they can defensively hold their own against giants, as we see in Ukraine. But soft power is a different matter. When we say a country is “punching above its weight,” we are usually referring to the way its makes its presence felt in soft-power arenas such as trade and commerce, cultural exports, or diplomatic positioning. The latter is where development aid comes in.

Sweden has a strong military defense, but it has not been a serious player in the offensive hard-power game for well over two centuries. Instead, since the 1960s, the country has been a master of soft power. Swedish cars, music, business and tech innovations perform far above what a small country might be expected to accomplish in a competitive global market. (Think Volvo, Abba, Ikea, Spotify, and Ludwig Göransson recently winning his third Oscar for the music of “Sinners”.) Swedish development aid has been an important part of that soft-power mix. The public goal of Swedish aid policy has been to assist people living in poverty and oppression to improve their own lives. But doing that aid “the Swedish way” has also helped establish Sweden’s reputation for trustworthiness and quality — and that, in turn, has rubbed off on Sweden economically and politically.

Here is a very concrete example, one that I witnessed personally. While on a mission to Vietnam to represent Sida and Sweden at an international development conference, I listened to person after person, in government, business, and academia, express their gratitude to Sweden for having financed their education. By then, Sweden had stopped funding development programs in Vietnam, because the country was no longer “poor.” But the memory of Sweden’s support was generational. Sweden’s “brand” was strong among senior figures in Vietnam’s educated class. So it should come as no surprise if I report that at the end of this conference, the Prime Minister of Vietnam and the regional head of Sweden’s telecom giant Ericsson announced that Ericsson had been awarded the contract to build Vietnam’s 5G network. The attention afforded that closing announcement, complete with press photos and congratulatory handshakes, far outstripped the conference itself.

I cannot prove that these two things were connected, Sweden’s history of development aid to Vietnam, and a Swedish company winning a large commercial contract there. But on the other hand, how could they not be connected? I personally believe that Ericsson’s chances had also been improved by the fact that Sweden, unlike many other countries, had not crassly linked its aid to any conditions or future expectations of commercial favoritism. By not demanding it, Sweden got it.

Diplomacy of this kind is not rocket science. Treat people with respect, instead of making demands and setting conditions based on self-interest, and they will like you, and want to do business with you. The current Swedish government and its advisors appear not to understand what had been built up in this way, globally, over a generation. The Swedish word for it is “förtroendekapital”, the capital of trust and confidence. By rapidly weakening, diminishing, and dismantling key aspects of the Swedish aid system — a gem of its genre — the Swedish government is effectively tossing this valuable jewel of “förtroendekapital” into the waste can, assuming it to be a worthless rock.

That is a shame for Sweden, because it diminishes the country’s status and capacity to wield influence on the global stage. And this is not a theoretical concern: the topic was recently discussed in connection the country’s major defense conclave, Folk och Försvar (“People and Defense”). Denmark, it was pointed out, had attracted international support to stand against the US government’s demands to acquire Greenland because Denmark is well-liked and well-respected. The operative phrase is reputational security — and this is part of what I believe Sweden has been carelessly throwing away in its rush to reconfigure development aid. The rush seems fueled by the misguided belief that a return to an old-fashioned, “scratch our backs or we won’t scratch yours” approach will better benefit Swedish business, and facilitate Sweden’s tough-on-immigration politics.

Of course, these new aid policies are clearly a catastrophe for the millions of people who have benefitted from Sweden’s principled, effective, “what do you think you need” way of doing development aid (which still exists, but is diminished). Many have now been completely and suddenly cut off from that support. It is very sad to think about the likely consequences of those decisions on a human level.

But Sweden’s about-face on development aid is also a tragedy for the world. Sweden, an admired role-model in the race to sustainable development, is voluntarily abandoning the pole position, and there are few others standing by to take its place. By deprioritizing its sense of moral duty to assist the most vulnerable, and moving Sweden farther down a path of “aid-for-trade” and other forms of instrumentalism, current policies are making Sweden look like a champion athlete who suddenly stops training so hard to be excellent, prefers to hang with local neighbors, and starts demanding high fees just to make an appearance at more distant and demanding venues.

This is what makes the tragedy of Swedish development aid truly global. The world needs development aid, more than ever, as climate change accelerates, progress on poverty reverses in some places, and the vulnerable become more vulnerable still. Meanwhile, the entire UN is in financial free fall. The global shift towards more authoritarian politics is undermining even the gathering of objective data about global problems. Military budgets are growing, conflict increasing, democracy declining.

If not even Sweden, an historic champion, will keep striving to rise to these challenges, will keep attempting to model the highest standards of effective development assistance, will keep prioritising people in poverty in its aid programs, then who will?

Alan AtKisson is a former Department Director at Sida, 2018-2024. He led the agency’s global programs on development-related research, capacity development, civil society, private sector collaboration, and mobilizing development investment through financial guarantees.