France’s draft 2026 Finance Bill: further cuts planned for Official Development Assistance

On October 14, 2025, the French government presented its draft Finance Bill for 2026. For the fourth time in a row, the Official Development Assistance (ODA) mission, which makes up only 0.6% of the state budget, is among those most affected.

The 2026 draft Finance Bill proposes a 704 million euros reduction in the ODA mission budget compared to the 2025 Finance Act (excluding a 134 million euros cut made by decree in April 2025), reducing it from 4.373 billion euros to 3.669 billion (-16%). Additionally, this budget proposal confirms France’s withdrawal from innovative development and climate financing since 2025 (see box below).

On average, state budget missions will be reduced by 2%. The ODA mission faces the third-largest reduction in terms of proportion (-16%), after the “Transformation and civil service” (-27%) and “Sport, youth, and associations” (-18%) missions, and the fourth-largest cut in terms of volume (-704 million euros), behind the “Labor, employment, and administration of social ministries” (-2.4 billion), “Territorial cohesion” (-894 million), and “Solidarity, integration, and equal opportunities” (-827 million) missions.

This is the fourth consecutive cut to the Official Development Assistance budget in under two years. Since 2021, when a law was passed to gradually increase funding for this policy, allocations have instead been reduced by 46%. If this trend continues, France’s total Official Development Assistance, as calculated by the OECD, could decline to 0.38% of GNI by 2026—returning to its 2016 level.

As an illustration, cutting 704 million euros from the budget of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria means 750,000 fewer lives preserved.