The UK government is to slash aid spending to some of the poorest countries in the world, as part of moves to reduce spending by 40 per cent.

Plans set out by the foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, will see bilateral support for African countries fall from £1.3bn a year to £677m over the next three years – a drop of 56 per cent – while countries such as Afghanistan, Yemen and Myanmar will also face severe reductions.

The government has also failed to fully protect funding for HIV, despite calls from The Independent, alongside MPs and charities, to maintain funding for HIV treatment up to 2030, amid concerns that progress in tackling the disease could be reversed as a result of the aid cuts, first announced last year.

While funding for certain core areas has been “protected” or kept the same – including to Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan – funding for HIV has not been classified as such. Going forward, UK aid spend on HIV is set to be largely channelled through funding for the Global Fund – which last December the UK confirmed would be cut by £150m – and bilateral aid programmes to developing countries in Africa and beyond, which are also set to be significantly cut.

Ms Cooper said that it is now planning to prioritise funding for multilateral institutions like the UN and World Bank – as well as funding for countries classified as “fragile and conflict-affected”, such as Sudan, Ukraine, Palestine, and now Lebanon – with aid sent to those countries increasing from 57 to 71 per cent. But even this represents an overall cut compared to the last few years. Aid spending will also be cut to G20 countries, including India, Indonesia and South Africa.

It also means that funding for low-income countries not classified as “fragile and conflict-affected” is likely to lose out substantially, with aid cuts of up to 60 per cent, despite the fact that many of these countries continue to struggle to attract foreign capital beyond aid.

Ms Cooper said: “Allocating a reduced budget inevitably leads to hard choices and unavoidable trade-offs … So we’re focusing aid on the people and places that need it most, and we will still be a major player, and expect to be the fifth biggest funder in the world.”

She added that the government has “fully protected central programme spending on violence against women and girls, women peace and security, and preventing sexual violence in conflict”. However, education programmes are likely to see cuts.

There will be a 56 per cent decline in support to Africa between 2026-27 and 2028-29, with cuts likely to hit bilateral aid to Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Mauritius, Senegal and Sierra Leone. The money that the UK spends on humanitarian crisis relief, such as for natural disasters, will also be reduced by 15 per cent to just under £300m a year.

Ian Mitchell, senior fellow at the Center for Global Development think tank, agreed that the impacts on Africa looked set to be severe: “Reducing the share of aid going to Africa, where most fragility, poverty, and future opportunity are concentrated, is difficult to justify and risks making talk of ‘global partnerships’ ring hollow,” he said.

“There remains strong public support for helping those most in need – and for a government serious about tackling extreme poverty, that means a clear focus on Africa.”

Meanwhile, climate funding will fall from £11.6bn across the five years to 2026 to £6bn over the next three years, a drop of almost 15 per cent. Funding for key multilateral funds supporting global health, including the Pandemic Fund and Global Polio Eradication Initiative, will also be cut. The aid budget also funds the cost of housing asylum seekers in UK hotels – roughly £2bn a year, about a fifth of the overseas aid budget – though this is set to fall.

Total spending was expected to fall from £10bn in 2026-27 to £8.9bn the following year before increasing slightly to £9.4bn in 2028-29.

Despite the news that HIV funding would not be protected, development minister Jenny Chapman said that it remained a priority for the government, telling The Independent that the government remained “as committed as ever to this agenda”.

“We’re really concerned about what’s happening with HIV at the moment, and we think there’s a risk that may begin to increase, particularly with younger girls,” Baroness Chapman said in a briefing with members of the media, adding that the UK would fund £4m towards UNAIDs before the agency is shut down and its services are absorbed into other agencies.

Tsara Crosfill Morton, senior policy and advocacy advisor for global child health at Unicef UK and a member of Action for Global Health’s steering committee, said: “Elements of the UK government’s commitment to global health also remain unclear. The government has promised strong support to some critical multilaterals while stepping back from others … the impact of cuts on other global health programming is [also] obscured.

“We urge the UK government to set out a clear and comprehensive strategic approach to global health and to ending the entirely preventable deaths of children.”

The aid announcements made on Thursday come a year after Sir Keir Starmer announced aid spending would be cut from 0.5 per cent to 0.3 per cent of gross national income (GNI), in a move that ministers said would help fund higher defence spending in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In response to Ms Cooper’s statement, Sarah Champion, chair of the International Development Select Committee, warned that the UK’s strategy of pursuing cuts to the aid budget to protect military spending was a false dichotomy.

“Development spend keeps people fed, safe and prosperous,” she told MPs. “We will see the consequences of the UK stepping away from the global stage to our reputation, to our influence, and also, people will be coming to our shores to seek sanctuary.

“These cuts do not aid our defence; they make the whole world more vulnerable.”

“The focus on women and girls – who are often the most vulnerable of the global poor – is encouraging,” Ms Champion said. “I particularly welcome the target of at least 90 per cent of the department’s aid programmes integrating gender equality by 2030. The capacity to enable this and to measure success will need to be safeguarded, and my committee will be scrutinising this promise closely.”

Monica Harding, the Liberal Democrat international development spokesperson, said that the cuts were a “moral catastrophe”, highlighting that they are likely to be more severe than the cuts made by Donald Trump in the US, as well as those made by the previous Conservative government.

Dr Ellie Chowns, the Green Party spokesperson on foreign affairs, said: “Cutting international aid is a false economy – and one which puts Britain’s security at greater risk.

“The UK’s defence does not exist in isolation from global security. You cannot make Britain safer by making the rest of the world more unstable.”

Catherine Pettengell, executive director of Climate Action Network UK, told The Independent that the cuts were “really bad”, given that UK climate finance had doubled every five years – which would have resulted in £23.2bn over five years as the next package.

In response to the cuts announcement, Adrian Lovett, UK executive director of the ONE Campaign, said: “Today’s figures lay bare the true scale of these cuts and the damage they will do. Slashing bilateral aid to Africa, where need is greatest, will have a devastating impact.

“These choices will leave millions without access to basic healthcare, education and urgent humanitarian support, and risk a resurgence of deadly diseases we’ve spent decades trying to fight.

“While FCDO officials have clearly worked to shield some priorities, they have been handed an impossible task. You simply cannot cut 40 per cent from the aid budget without devastating consequences, and that will now play out in the world’s poorest countries.

This article has been produced as part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project