International Development Expert Highlights Scotland-Malawi Relationship as a Model Worth Protecting

Scotland’s civic society links, alongside sustained government funding have been highlighted by a leading authority on International Development Strategy & Finance as a “model worth Scotland protecting.”

Mikaela Gavas, Managing Director of the Center for Global Development (CGD) delivered the keynote address at SIDA’s annual conference with its theme When Everything Matters; Making Tough But Positive Choices. Speaking at the highly regarded annual event held on Tuesday in Edinburgh's Dynamic Earth, Ms Gavas shared how much harder that politics of painful choices has become over the last twelve months and suggested where positive choices still exist.

In a conference skilfully chaired by campaigner, researcher and writer, Talat Yaqoob, Ms Gavas began by setting the scene with the scale of what has changed, noting that in 2025 global military spending reached $2.9 trillion while in the same year, global aid experienced its steepest single year drop to $174 billion. While the UK and other nations had made cuts, the United States was responsible for three-quarters of this reduction. Globally, Humanitarian assistance has been the hardest hit, being down almost 36% in 12 months. At a time when developing countries are experiencing multiple pressures from all directions, Ms Gavas said the system is responding by being reorganised with the principle of “solidarity” replaced by the concept of “mutual interest”.

The CGD's MD for Europe commented:

“Development cooperation justified because it serves the provider's own security, commercial or geopolitical interest. Such investments can be valuable, and where provider and partner interests genuinely converge, they may generate real development outcomes. But those investments are not as common as the rhetoric often suggests, and they do not always correspond to where development investment would have the greatest impact.” She continued: “Left unchecked, that logic turns development cooperation into a bilateral contract — money for stopping migrants, money for mineral access, with climate, gender and rights protections quietly dropped from the terms.”

Finance, Ms Gavas said, is shifting from grants towards investment, but that:

• nearly 70% of private finance mobilised between 2021 and 2024 went to middle-income countries
• only 8% reached the poorest countries
• of the $137 billion of climate finance mobilised, only $9.6 billion reached low-income countries
• Aid targeted at the very poorest people in the world roughly tripled between 1990 and 2018, but almost a third of that progress has been lost in just the last six years.

Mikaela Gavas said that the CGD is working on hard questions about what official development assistance is for and who gets to decide and is “building the evidence agencies need to tell where their money will have an impact.” She said that the World Bank’s IDA22 replenishment which decides the funds which support the poorest countries is being renegotiated now and that the UK’s G20 presidency may provide an opportunity to put key reforms at the centre of global economic conversation.

“So what can a small nation like Scotland actually do?”, Ms Gavas asked rhetorically. She had three thoughts to offer:

1. “credibility earned through consistency matters more than the size of a budget. Scotland's international development fund is small by global standards, but it has built a reputation for being principled, predictable and partner-led at a moment when much larger donors are becoming transactional and unpredictable. That reputational capital is worth protecting.”
2. “Scotland's clearest proof of that consistency is Malawi, its longest standing development partner. Malawi was already one of the most under-aided countries in the world before this year. The United States has now cut its support there by well over a hundred million dollars. The UK is slashing its own funding from around fifty million pounds this year to just five million by 2028. Combined, that's a hit more than twenty times the size of everything Scotland currently gives Malawi. But, what's actually distinctive about Scotland here is the civic partnership underneath it. The Scotland Malawi Partnership, linking well over a thousand Scottish organisations with counterparts in Malawi, is by its own reckoning the largest cross-community development network anywhere in the UK. It runs on its own partnership principles - projects designed and led by Malawians first, reciprocity in both directions, no “parachute in” pilots. It is independent of the Scottish Government - any nation or region of the UK could build something like it. What's harder to replicate is the combination: two decades of that kind of civic depth sitting alongside sustained government funding, each lending the other credibility. That pairing is the model worth Scotland protecting.”
   
3. “a small nation can be a serious partner in scaling what already works, as long as it's willing to back locally-led models for the long term. Three decades of evidence tell us a great deal about what has and hasn't worked in development. But what we do with it now is a live choice. The system isn't disappearing. It's being reorganised, around mutual interest, around a smaller budget, around investment rather than grants. That reorganisation is a choice.”

Watch in full here on SIDA’s website. Mikaela Gavas’ presentation is at 9.43-25.38 in the recording available here: SIDA Annual Conference 2026 - Scotland's International Development Alliance