How effective do citizens think government aid to developing countries is?

Citizens’ faith in their governments to tackle poverty in developing countries sits at around 23% across all four countries polled (France, Germany, the UK and the US).

On the other hand, the percentage of respondents who were absolutely convinced that their governments did not have any influence is higher with British people (39%) than with French (28%) or German people (31%).

The percentage of respondents who were merely doubtful about their respective government’s influence was higher for French (38%) as well as German respondents (35%) than for British (29%) or American respondents (27%).

The highest numbers for "I don’t know" answers were for French (13%) and American respondents (15%).

Official development assistance suffers from a real lack of esteem in all four countries surveyed, with only 8% of French people, 11% of German and British, and 14% of American people agreeing on the effectiveness of development aid.

In addition, between 13% (of German people) and 19% (of American people) could not answer the question, whereas 37% of French and German people and 30% of British and American people had no real opinion either way on whether development aid provided by their governments was effective or not.

Between 38% and 45% of citizens across all four countries were certain that aid given by their governments to developing countries was ineffective.

This data comes from our survey conducted by the YouGov Institute and piloted by the research team at University College London and the University of Birmingham as part of the project Aid Attitudes Tracker which measures the evolution of opinions and behaviors on issues of international solidarity in four countries..

Further reading

Retrouvez la méthodologie du projet Aid Attitudes Tracker

Documents to download

Retrouvez la méthodologie du projet Aid Attitudes Tracker