Spain has tripled its aid to Palestine, the largest increase for a country in a single year

Eduardo González Spain has tripled official development aid to Palestine in the last year, which represents the largest increase for a country in a single year in the history of Spanish Cooperation, according to what the director of the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), Antón Leis, reported this week before the Congress. Leis appeared last Tuesday before the Commission for International Cooperation for Development of the Lower House to explain the priorities of the AECID in this legislature, as well as the process of reform of the Agency and of the Spanish Cooperation after the approval of the new Law of Cooperation for Sustainable Development and Global Solidarity. During his speech, Antón Leis explained that the current Government “has doubled the budget of the AECID”, which has gone from 360 million in 2021 to more than 700 in 2023 and 2024, “recovering levels not seen in the last decade”. “From the first to the last, those euros are not an expense, they are an investment. Investment in a world at peace, a more stable world, a more prosperous world, a fairer world”, he assured. According to Leis, Spain needs “cooperation aligned” with the Government’s “foreign policy”, as is highlighted, he said, “with the enormous exercise of coherence that Spain is demonstrating in Ukraine and the Middle East and that our partners in the world, especially in the developing world, value and appreciate”. With this starting point, he explained, the AECID will exceed this year, “in all probability”, the 114 million euros allocated last year to humanitarian emergencies and “to the seven contexts of prolonged crises that we prioritize in the Humanitarian Strategy of Spanish Cooperation: Palestine, the Syrian crisis (which includes Lebanon), the Sahel, Latin America and the Caribbean (with special attention to the Venezuelan migration crisis, Colombia, Central America and Haiti), Sahrawi camps, Afghanistan and Ukraine”. “This figure is already three times that of 2018”, he added. Palestine, Lebanon, Ukraine, Sahel “We have tripled our official development aid to Palestine in the last year, the largest increase for a country in a single year in the history of Spanish Cooperation,” said Antón Leis. “We intend to continue strengthening both our humanitarian action and our cooperation with the Palestinian Authority and Spanish and Palestinian civil society that works in a very difficult context, of course in Gaza but also in the West Bank,” he continued. “Furthermore, AECID will continue working closely with UNRWA, a key organisation in providing a future of hope to six million Palestinian refugees not only in Gaza but in the entire region and absolutely indispensable for getting aid to Gazans who need it,” he said. “This year we have already channelled 23.5 million euros from AECID and we have assumed the presidency, which I hold, of its advisory board,” he added. The director of the AECID also referred to Lebanon, “a country that is included in the 2024-2027 Master Plan as a priority” and where the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, “announced at the beginning of this year a significant financial commitment of 30 million Euros over three years, given the fragile situation that the country was already experiencing, affected by a severe economic and energy crisis, the explosion in the port of Beirut in 2020 or the consequences of regional instability”. “Unfortunately, it is very likely that we will exceed that figure given the humanitarian catastrophe caused by the conflict”, he warned. “We have already channelled almost 12 tonnes of aid in direct shipments, and only from the AECID, between cooperation and humanitarian action, we will triple the aid in 2022 to more than nine million euros”, he announced. On the other hand, Leis recalled that Ukraine appears as a country “of special interest” in the new Master Plan. “Since the beginning of the Russian aggression, AECID has channelled 66 million euros to a country where we did not have, as was the case with other European partners, a pre-existing cooperation programme,” he explained. “In addition to humanitarian action focused on victims, refugees and internally displaced persons, we have begun to support the recovery and reconstruction efforts in Ukraine, focusing above all on demining (a key priority for resuming agricultural production or rebuilding cities destroyed by bombing, for example) but also on health, education, energy and culture,” he continued. “As the President of the Government (Pedro Sánchez) pointed out in his speech at the United Nations General Assembly, next year we will work more intensively on the recovery of the energy and water sectors, key to the resilience of the Ukrainian population and to the future of the country itself,” he added. The director of the AECID also recalled that the new Master Plan elevates the Sahel “to the category of priority region”, which, as the President of the Government pointed out last week in this chamber, we have tripled Spanish ODA to the region, from 31 million euros in 2017 to 92 million euros in 2022”. According to Leis, the development of the Sahel is “fundamental” for “the stability of a strategic region for Spain”.

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