李月芬：我曾告诫一些非洲国家，大量借款时要小心(10)

Traditionally, to a lesser extent now, countries relied on official development assistance. We call that in brief ODA, which goes through fluctuations and volatility, as well as various kinds of diversions. It"s called development assistance, but it may not really be channeled to development.
In the past, especially some least developed countries rely a lot on this ODA and we call that aid reliance of these countries. They depend on ODA for filling their financing gap as much as possible. But we know nowadays there are various kinds of ODA diversions. For instance, with the Ukraine war, the developed countries use a lot of ODA for accommodating refugees in their own countries, which means ODA actually is spent within the developed countries for, to some extent, geopolitical purposes, it"s not directly for economic development of developing countries at all.
From 1996, when we had the heavily indebted developing countries debt relief initiative, followed by another initiative where the major donor countries provided funds to the international financial institutions to provide multilateral debt relief. After that, there was a tremendous change from the donor countries. Major donor countries basically stopped or drastically reduced their bilateral ODA. Some countries pronounce very clearly we are no longer bilateral donors.