How much is Bill Gates’ GAVI getting from UK’s foreign aid?
On Tuesday, Keir Starmer announced drastic cuts to Britain’s international aid budget to help pay for a major increase in defence spending. The aid budget will be reduced from 0.5% to 0.3% of GDP.
We have heard many recipients of UK aid concerned about its impact on them. What we haven’t heard is what the UK is actually spending taxpayers’ money on.
RHODA WILSON
“We will cut our spending on development assistance, moving from 0.5 per cent of GNI [gross national income] today to 0.3 per cent in 2027 … I am proud of our pioneering record on overseas development, and we will continue to play a key humanitarian role in Sudan, in Ukraine and in Gaza, tackling climate change, supporting multinational efforts on global health and challenges like vaccination,” Starmer said in a speech in the House of Commons on Tuesday.
Overseas development aid falls under the remit of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (“FCDO”) headed by David Lammy.
In a separate incident, social media users have recently claimed that Lammy’s FCDO had spent £521,525 on restaurants and bars from July to October 2024 – which brought an overkill reaction from “fact-checkers.”
“Fact-checkers” must now be using a bot farm or AI to disseminate their “reports” because the exact same “fact-check” with the same title, featuring the same image of David Lammy appeared in numerous outlets on Monday.
Copy and paste “Fact check: The Foreign Office spent £521,527 on restaurants and bars” into a search engine and you’ll see that the same “fact-check” article will appear in 80 different online outlets, all posted on Monday. One outlet is dubiously named ‘The Impartial Reporter’.
We guess whoever is pushing out “fact-checks” was desperately trying to get the message out. So, what was the message they were flooding the internet with? “This is not the figure for Mr. Lammy’s personal expenses. It is the total spent by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) as a whole on restaurants and bars for the four months from July to October 2024,” the 80 “fact-check” articles said.
Lammy may not have spent all of it himself but he is responsible for his department’s spending.
Because “fact-checkers” appear desperate to keep Lammy away from a scandal and because Starmer will prioritise the fictitious climate change agenda and multinational efforts on vaccinations, we thought we’d take a cursory look at who Lammy’s FCDO has been funding.
FCDO’s restaurant and bar expenditures appeared on the department’s credit cards. The Spectator’s SPAFF database has split credit card expenditure from “foreign aid.” The UK government’s ‘Development Tracker’ shows expenditure per programme for all departments which may run over several years; with a filter to select a specific department’s expenditure, e.g. FCDO. The Spectator’s database doesn’t make a note of the dates of when the expenditure occurred and there is no obvious tie into the FCDO’s data. So, we have resorted to browsing the ‘Development Tracker’ which shows more details.
Introduction to UK Aid
In 1970, Britain pledged to spend at least 0.7% of GNI on foreign aid as part of a United Nations pact. In 2020, the Conservative government reduced overseas aid from 0.7% to 0.5% of GNI to free up cash for domestic spending during covid.
According to The Conversation, 34% of Britain’s foreign aid consists of contributions to multilateral organisations like the United Nations and World Bank. A research briefing published by the UK parliament in February 2025 gave a little more detail:
Current pressures include spending on refugees in the UK and international climate finance commitments that the Conservative Government planned for 2024/25 and 2025/26. Several multilateral organisations, including the World Health Organisation (WHO), Gavi, the vaccine alliance, and the International Development Association (IDA, part of the World Bank) have also launched requests for funding replenishments to cover their work from 2025. The Labour Government says it will provide £1.98 billion to the IDA over the next three years and £310 million to the WHO for 2024 to 2028.
Ongoing pressures on the overseas aid budget, UK aid: spending reductions since 2020 and outlook from 2024/25, UK Parliament, 12 February 2025
The International Climate Finance (“ICF”) commitments noted above refer to the “promised contributions to the UNFCCC commitment to jointly mobilise US$100 billion climate finance a year for developing countries.” The UNFCCC is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
As we note payments being made to the IDA (World Bank), the UN and climate commitments, we should recall that the World Bank, for example, are not transparent and not acting with integrity regarding the money they are given. We previously noted that the majority of 2,500 “climate mitigation” projects funded by the World Bank have little to do with climate. And towards the end of last year, scrutiny of the World Bank intensified over $24 billion in unaccounted climate funds.
As alluded to in the UK Parliament research briefing, in recent years, the second biggest spending of foreign aid has been the domestic costs relating to immigrants. The Conversation noted that 23% of the British aid budget in 2023 was made up by Home Office spending on housing refugees in the UK. However, an article in Context stated that 27.9% of Britain’s foreign aid was spent domestically on refugees. In 2023, Context said, Britain spent £15.34 billion in Official Development Assistance (“ODA”) (0,58% of GDP), which included £4.3 billion on refugee costs in the UK (27.9% of total ODA spending).
British foreign aid or overseas aid is often referred to as ODA. ODA is a specific type of aid intended to promote the economic development and welfare of developing countries. It must meet certain criteria set by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (“OECD”) Development Assistance Committee (“DAC”) to be counted as ODA. It’s not clear whether Context is using the looser term meaning foreign aid or the OECD definition of ODA, which could explain the difference between the percentages quoted by The Conversation and Context.
In the 2024 Autumn Budget, the UK government said that it would not renew the £2.5 billion top-up to the aid budget that was introduced to offset spending on hotels for refugees and asylum seekers in the UK. And the budget referenced plans to reduce spending on hotels for refugees.
Context also noted that at 0.5% of GDP, the UK’s ODA will be £13.7 billion for 2025-2026. How much of that will be on domestic costs for refugees is not known. The reduction to 0.3% of GNI is set to take effect by 2027.
As it’s estimated that approximately 57%-62% of the UK’s foreign aid goes to immigrant costs and multilateral organisations, depending on whether 23% or 27.9% is spent on immigrants, we thought we’d see what other large expenditures are lurking in the FCDO’s budget. And one in particular stood out – GAVI.
GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance
Obviously, if the UK were to leave the criminal World Health Organisation and the United Nations, huge savings could be made. Not only on contributions to these organisations but also payments made to spread and capitalise on the UN’s nefarious “climate change” agenda.
One of the other big savings that could be had is to defund Bill Gates’ GAVI.
In October 2024, the BBC reported that Bill Gates joined a chorus of international development voices criticising the Government for cutting billions in overseas aid spending in the Budget. It’s not surprising considering how much GAVI milks the UK taxpayer.
Attached below is a summary of a search for “GAVI” on the UK government’s ‘Development Tracker’; 348 results are returned where GAVI is either the sole recipient of UK funds or is a participating organisation in the programme.
From 2010 to 2025, FCDO has “invested” just under £3 billion in GAVI. In addition to this, FCDO paid £96,000 for the hosting of the GAVI Replenishment Conference in 2020 and technical support in 2008.
Another £1.4 billion has been given to GAVI-related programmes, in the main between 2018 and 2025. The GAVI-related funding is primarily either to the World Health Organisation (£917 million) or UNICEF (£500 million). Depending on the programme, there could be several participating organisations listed. Of the £917 million given to WHO, £400 million relates to polio eradication from 2013 to 2019 (read why this is the problem and not the solution HERE), £430 million was spent on what would seem to be health systems that could benefit people, and £87 million relates to preparedness, health strategies and implementation of International Health Regulations. The £500 million given to UNICEF largely relates to policies, strategies, monitoring, planning and communications.
Adding it all together, over the last ten years or so, the UK government has given £4.4 billion to GAVI and GAVI-related programmes. However, please see our notes below on how we compiled these figures as it’s not as straightforward or definitive as it first appears, but it’s a start and going through the list makes one realise just how little of the UK foreign aid is actually benefitting people. To go some way in demonstrating this further, on its website the UK government has a collection of ODA resources which was first published in 2015 and last updated in March 2023. It lists some of the programmes the FCDO funds. You can find the collection HERE.
How We Compiled the Summary and Inherent Problems
We couldn’t see a way of downloading the data and a number of the programmes have a budget but no “spend,” so we manually clicked through each one to note how much was spent.
A programme will span several countries, where this is the case, the ‘Development Tracker’ has a separate programme for each country. For ease, we have lumped all the countries together under one programme. The list above has been compiled manually so E&OE.
Aside from potential human errors in the compiling of it manually, the summary figures from the search are far from definitive. This is for a few reasons:
1. Although in the search results, GAVI is shown as a participating organisation, we weren’t able to find mention of GAVI in the details. For example, the image below is a screenshot of how the search results are shown:
But when the link provided is followed, the programme page does not show GAVI as a participating organisation:
We don’t know why the search results show GAVI as a participating organisation while the programme details do not. However, we noted that many programmes showed “IP not published” listed under participating organisations, which adds to the lack of clarity (see image below for an example).
It should be noted that in our summary the “(UNICEF/GAVI)” and “(WHO/GAVI)” have been added by us for informational purposes and do not show in the programmes’ title on the ‘Development Tracker’. We have also added the years the programmes relate to, also shown in brackets e.g. “(2020-2021).”
2. Bizarrely, several programmes have “World Health Organisation” or “UNICEF” noted in the field where the UK government department should be noted. Without a lot more (manual) work, it’s not possible to know within which UK government department’s budget these expenditures sit. However, as these programmes are indicated as ODA programmes, we can assume they form part of FCDO’s budget.
3. There are some programmes for which the hyperlink to the details is not working so we have excluded them. Most, if not all, of the broken hyperlinks are for programmes where UNHCR is shown in the UK government department field.
This article (How much is Bill Gates’ GAVI getting from UK’s foreign aid?) was created and published by The Expose and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Rhoda Wilson
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