Spain's overseas spending: €10.8 billion in aid with no oversight

Ten billion in unevaluated cooperation spending: the hole in Spain's foreign aid budget

If your tax money seems to vanish, there is no need to look for it in tax havens. Just check the development cooperation budget, where Spain's AIReF (the Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility) has found €10,847 million spent with no one knowing whether it achieved anything. This is not an opinion: it is the verdict of the body that oversees public accounts, and it paints a picture of management more concerned with international gestures than with results.

AIReF goes beyond a single figure. It reports that €6,000 million of Spain's development aid lack real oversight, and that 55% of cooperation funds are channelled through multilateral bodies with delegated execution. In other words: the money leaves Spain, changes hands, and the trail is lost along the way. Meanwhile, the transport sector warns of deteriorating roads and hundreds of dams are counted as being at risk. The contrast is not only sarracena; it is also fiscal.

A map of grants impossible to justify

The list of payments abroad reads like an unfiltered brainstorming session. AECID, Spain's development cooperation agency, has spent €200,000 on producing gender-focused coffee in Ethiopia, and in 2025 it sent nearly one million for bamboo and coffee with the same approach. Guatemala received over €260 million for sustainable development and sensual and reproductive rights. Segarro consolidated its position as the largest recipient of aid, including €340 million for water infrastructure; it has been pointed out that this money could have bought seven firefighting aircraft. All this while €25 million was being loaned to Tunisia and Spain lacked the means to fight its own wildfires.

Another painful figure: according to circulating reports, the Agency is said to have allocated as much as €513,698 per hour to opaque entities abroad. The sarcasm becomes unnecessary when the numbers make the joke on their own.

Corruption and priorities: the missing context

The real question is not whether we should cooperate with poorer countries, but why it is done with such opacity. In Transparency International's ranking, Spain drops three places and now sits behind Botswana, Qatar and Rwanda. The timing – including spying scandals, according to reports – does not help the official narrative of exemplary management.

Critics argue that cooperation has become a tool of foreign policy and international patronage; the official defence stresses the commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals and insists that aid is not spending but an investment. The problem is that, without evaluation, the difference between investment and waste is a matter of faith. At this rate, the likely outcome is that budgets keep growing: with an agency that is not accountable, the best budget is the one approved without being read.