Southern official flows to Africa: Trends, features and challenges

In recent years, Africa has received significant amounts of financial contributions from both developed and developing countries. While Africa’s traditional partners generally refer to their contributions as aid or ODA, Southern partners do not consider their financial contributions to other developing countries as aid or ODA. Rather they describe these as “expressions of solidarity and cooperation borne out of shared experiences and sympathies”. Despite these differences, it should be noted that there is no agreed language on what these contributions from Southern partners to other developing countries should be called. Consequently, in this report we use the term “official flows”, where appropriate, to describe contributions from Southern partners with the recognition that in the literature “official flows” generally refers to ODA and transactions of the official sector with developing countries that do not meet the conditions for eligibility as ODA (box 4).

Related Subject(s): Economic and Social Development

Countries: South Africa