Hundreds of millions of people in the developing world will suffer if European governments use their overseas aid budgets to cover the costs of hosting refugees or to bankroll their own domestic security policies, a coalition of charities and anti-poverty groups has claimed.

The warning comes as the OECD’s development assistance committee (DAC) – the body that defines and oversees what spending its members can count as aid – prepares to discuss the response to the refugee crisis and the development agenda for the next 15 years. This week also sees a European council meeting on migration and refugees.

Foreign aid, known as official development assistance (ODA), reached a record high of $135.1bn in 2013. But there are growing fears that the refugee crisis and domestic political pressure are leading donor countries to consider spending more of their ODA budgets at home.

The campaigners, who point out that aid to the poorest countries is falling, claim that among the items on the agenda for Friday and Saturday’s DAC meeting are proposals that ODA could be used for “preventing violent extremism”, training police and other security costs.



They say the mooted reallocation of funds could take money away from public services such as healthcare and education in developing countries.

The coalition – which includes Oxfam International, Save the Children, the international development network Bond, the ONE campaign and the European network on Debt and Development (Eurodad) – is calling on European leaders to ensure that ODA spending does not include defence, security, or in-country refugee costs, and to include developing countries and NGOs in discussions on modernising aid.

“Development aid is meant to empower poor people – rich countries shouldn’t be diverting it to fill their budget gaps or advance their security agenda,” said Sara Tesorieri, deputy head of Oxfam’s EU office.

“Europe must support building institutions that ensure democracy and respect for human rights so more people can overcome conflict and live in peace and security. But if donor countries divert more resources away from development, hundreds of millions of poor people will lose out.”

In 2014, Italy and the Netherlands more than doubled the amount of ODA allocated to in-country refugee costs, and the OECD estimates that the proportion of aid spending reported as in-donor refugees costs will be much higher in 2015 and this year.

Last September, the British government said it would be using funds from the multi-billion pound aid budget to help local authorities cover the costs of housing refugees. According to DAC rules, money spent on temporarily assisting refugees from developing countries can be counted as ODA “during the first 12 months of stay”.

However, Eurodad takes issue with the existing guidelines and is urging European governments to focus on using aid to help the world’s poorest people.

Jeroen Kwakkenbos, Eurodad’s policy and advocacy manager, said the aid budget was a “completely inappropriate” source of defence and security funding.

“Under flawed rules that exist at the OECD, aid can already be used for sizeable expenses in rich countries, such as refugee costs and overseas student costs,” he said.

“These new proposals could divert even more money away from the world’s poorest in order to serve the domestic and foreign policies of rich countries.”



Tamira Gunzberg, director of One Brussels, said supporting refugees and aid programmes need not be mutually exclusive, adding: “Pitting the plights of the world’s most vulnerable people against each other is not a just or sustainable solution.”

In an article he co-wrote for the Guardian last year, Erik Solheim, the chair of the DAC, warned that reducing aid budgets or using them to pay for hosting refugees in donor countries could have a dire impact on development.

Solheim and his co-author, Helen Clark, the head of the UN Development Programme, also noted that the rules on in-country refugee spending were made “at a time when costs connected to refugees were negligible” adding: “Doing it at scale is unwise.”