How do you tell a mother, sitting with a child on the verge of death by starvation, that her little one isn’t as important as somebody in your country?
That’s the reality facing aid workers in Ethiopia if our government turns off the tap of foreign aid.
National’s pledge to cut foreign aid to fund more medicines for Kiwis has been labelled desperate and dangerous by Winston Peters, and disappointing by Stephen Court, a Kiwi aid worker who’s seen first-hand the disastrous effects of what will happen.
Programmes in Pacific countries will be protected under National’s plan, but outside the region the overall budget would be slashed by 25 percent or an estimated $100 million.
The money would be redirected into medicines and expanding cancer screening, National leader Christopher Luxon saying he is making no apology for putting “our country and our people first”.
Court, the head of international partnerships at World Vision, says National is pitting the needs of New Zealanders needing urgent cancer care against hundreds of thousands of people facing starvation.
“We all can relate to the need for New Zealanders to have better access to health care, particularly around cancer. So pitting them, in a sense, against each other is really hard to see,” he says.
“You know, the person that I’ve met in the communities I’ve been to, the mother who’s sitting there with a child who’s half the weight it should be, on the verge of death, you know, and trying to say to that mother, your child is as important as somebody in my country.”
As the agency’s head of development and humanitarian programmes in Ethiopia, Court was in charge of $600 million in foreign aid, half New Zealand’s entire annual $1.2 billion budget. After six years there he’s back home but still pushing for money from the government and raising funds from private sources.
He witnessed the direct impact of USAID freezing support to Ethiopia not once, but twice.
The first time, in 2023, the food was in warehouses in the country but Court and his team were not allowed to distribute it.
He tells The Detail what it was like to tell desperate people they couldn’t have the food.
“It was horrid because we had warehouses, we had food, we had the trucks, we had the ability to feed these people, but we were not allowed. And so then it’s really challenging because communities often blame the face that they see.”
According to the OECD, international aid from member countries and associates of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) fell in 2025 by 23.1 percent in real terms compared to 2024, the largest annual drop in the history of official development assistance.
In its April 2026 report it said “this contraction brings ODA to levels last seen in 2015” and represents 0.26 of the countries’ combined gross national income.
New Zealand’s foreign aid is 0.27 percent of GDP.
Ethiopia is among the 150 countries that get New Zealand aid annually. In the last two years several million dollars have been granted for communities there facing severe food insecurity and other humanitarian needs.
Court says New Zealand’s contribution in Ethiopia is small but significant.
“They’re incredible, those projects. They may be small but they’re very targeted, needed, and when they go, they’re missed.
“It’s not about the size of the purse, because the New Zealand purse is not big, but the New Zealand contribution across the globe is significant where it is. It saves lives.”
Newsroom’s associate editor Sam Sachdeva says the Pacific gets the biggest chunk of our aid money, and that would be protected under National’s plan.
“We focus very heavily on the Pacific. I think it’s about 60 percent of our money goes there, a little bit of money goes into multilateral international organisations, things like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, the United Nations and so on.
“And then sort of the rest gets sprinkled around different parts of the world.”
He says our foreign aid is more than an altruistic gesture – it does enhance our global reputation.
“We’re putting so much money into the Pacific and yes, it’s because there are populations there that need our support and do need new energy infrastructure, but it’s also because, and I think this has been laid out by the foreign ministry, by politicians; any instability there as a result of conflict, that might be because there’s not enough money, not enough resources.
“That could cost us more in the long run by having to send military support over, provide some sort of policing, or anything like that. That is more expensive than investing money in at the front end on aid, on social development, on infrastructure, on economic development.”
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