2026-09-16 · percent of rich-country GNI

ODA is tiny next to domestic budgets

All official aid is visible — still under 0.5% of rich-country income.

Aid gets argued over like a giant budget line, but laid out in full it nearly vanishes: all official development assistance, from every donor, adds up to about 0.3% of rich-country income — under half a percent, per OECD DAC figures. The grid gives all of aid one thin band; the other 99.8% of donor GNI is everything else. That's the scale the 2026 edition makes visible.

1 cell = 0.1 percent of rich-country GNI (0.1% of donor GNI) · 1,000 cells

Context

The whole of this grid is donor GNI — the combined national income of rich countries. One band holds all official development assistance reported to the OECD's Development Assistance Committee; the other holds everything else in donor economies, at 99.8%. The aid band is labeled 0.3%, with the underlying OECD share near 0.25% of donor GNI.

That ratio is why the title is literal, not rhetorical: the entire ODA flow is a fraction of one percent of donor income, dwarfed by everything donor economies do at home. The grid's contribution is visibility — all official aid appears at once, and it still fits in a sliver of the whole.

Read the grid as a scale check on the donor side. It compares ODA with donor capacity, not with how aid is allocated or what it accomplishes.

OECD DAC ODA as share of donor GNI (~0.25%).