Ambrela’s 2025 AidWatch report highlights the limitations and systemic weaknesses of Slovakia’s existing Official development assistance (ODA) framework.

The 2025 AidWatch report, released on October 20 by Slovak NGDO Platform – Ambrela, covers the period 2022–2024. During this period, Slovakia’s development cooperation was under intense pressure due to a rapidly changing geopolitical and humanitarian landscape. During this period, the world faced an increasing number of crises, including the war in Ukraine, climate challenges and the aftermath of the pandemic. This also highlighted the limitations and systemic weaknesses of Slovakia’s existing official development assistance (ODA) framework.

Currently, Slovakia contributes only 0.13–0.15% of its GNI to development cooperation, which is well below the international commitment to reach 0.33% by 2030. In order to meet this target, Slovakia would need to increase its budget by €74 million each year. However, Slovak aid’s real value has fallen by a fifth over the last three years due to inflation, and by an even greater amount in the longer term, given that the SAIDC budget for subsidies has remained stable at around €5 million per year for over a decade.
What is disturbing is the fact that up to 48% of bilateral aid in 2022 and up to 43% in 2023 consisted of so-called inflated aid, i.e. funds that either never left Slovakia or did not significantly contribute to poverty reduction in partner countries. In 2021-2023, the largest factor in inflated aid was the donation of COVID-19 vaccines worth €10-14 million per year.

As a neighbour of Ukraine, the Slovak Republic had a unique opportunity to play a more significant role in providing humanitarian aid. However, Slovakia ranked 34th out of 42 donor countries in terms of the share of humanitarian aid to GDP. In 2022, Slovakia provided Ukraine with €8.3 million, which the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs itself stated was ten times less than would be appropriate based on Slovakia’s share of the global GDP. The state’s response to the crisis was characterised by slow processes: it took three months to declare humanitarian appeals after the Russian invasion, with administrative processes taking between three and six months. At the same time, Slovakia lacks an effective, modern mechanism for rapid and flexible humanitarian responses, which restricts its capacity to respond swiftly to large-scale crises in the region and worldwide. Therefore, it is important to strengthen institutional preparation and introduce more effective response tools to meet the challenges of a dynamically changing humanitarian environment.

Geographical and sectoral fragmentation of aid remains significant: in 2022, after deducting inflated aid, a total of €20 million was spent across 40 countries, averaging half a million euros per partner country. Programme countries, which should be flagship partners, receive only 8–10% of bilateral aid, which undermines their status and potential for deeper partnerships. The system has also undergone unpredictable changes, including the removal of all least developed countries (LDCs) from the list of SAIDC calls for proposals without a phasing-out strategy.

Decisions are becoming less predictable and consistent. The total number of projects submitted by development organisations decreased from 96 in 2020 to 37 in 2024, marking a 61% decline. In 2024, there were dramatic cuts of up to 63% of the originally planned allocations without prior notice. One of the persistent challenges is the weak institutional support for global education. Despite commitments made in the Dublin Declaration, Slovakia had not adopted a National Strategy for Global Education by the end of 2024, despite three versions of the text having already been prepared. Funding for this area is also modest: in 2022, the total amount allocated to global education projects was only €60,000; in 2023, it was €150,000; and in 2024, it reached €150,000. By comparison, the Czech Republic supported projects with significantly higher amounts during the same period — three to four times more.

Although no fundamental systemic reforms or new development cooperation instruments were adopted during this period, the introduction of strategic partnerships can be considered an important step forward. This format enables the implementation of larger, longer-term projects with budgets of up to €1 million and implementation periods of three to five years. The first project in this format began in the health sector in Kenya in 2022, followed by another in the agricultural sector in Moldova in 2023. Although this initiative was terminated after two years, it was an important pilot with potential for the future.

Another positive development was the successful acquisition of the first SlovakAid projects under the delegated competence of the European Union. In 2022, the Slovak agency SAIDC administered a €1 million project to support free media in Moldova. This success was followed by projects implemented in Serbia, Kenya and South Africa. These projects demonstrate that Slovakia has the capacity to participate in more complex, internationally coordinated development initiatives, which can increase the credibility and visibility of Slovak ODA within the EU.

However, the period from 2022 to 2024 is a critical milestone for Slovak development cooperation. Without systemic reforms, there is a risk of further erosion of Slovakia’s credibility as a development partner, as well as a waste of opportunities to contribute meaningfully to solving global crises, which ultimately affect the population of the Slovak Republic too. At the same time, the ongoing humanitarian crisis in neighbouring Ukraine continues to highlight the limitations of the current approach, the urgent need for the system to be comprehensively modernised, and its potential and benefits. 

Reforms are therefore essential, including, for example, a significant increase in ODA to 0.33% of GNI by 2030, a systematic increase in the share of bilateral aid to at least 30% of total ODA, the introduction of a modern rapid humanitarian response mechanism, and the adoption of a National Strategy for Global Education. It is also crucial to stabilise and streamline support for non-state actors in development cooperation, and to rebuild confidence in the predictability and continuity of development policy. Read the Ambrela’s AidWatch 2025 report here.