What are the biggest reported flows between the UK and developing countries?

Development Monitor has crunched public data on trade, aid, remittances and investment to investigate which developing countries send and receive the most from the UK.  

Here is a taste of what our new dashboard can tell us about the UK’s interactions with low-income countries in 2017.

The World Bank classified 34 countries as ‘low-income’ in 2017.[i]  They are around 50 times poorer than the UK, with per capita incomes averaging around £1.60 per day in 2017. [ii] Many low-income countries are in sub Saharan Africa but also include Afghanistan, Nepal and Yemen.

For these low-income countries:

  • Their biggest reported outflows to the UK are payments for UK services. Seven low income countries spend 1-2% of their GDP on services from the UK, such as management consulting, financial services, engineering services. They are: Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Liberia, Senegal, Mozambique, The Gambia. As noted in our earlier article, these payments are sometimes worth much more than the bilateral aid they receive from the UK, e.g. Zimbabwe (£279m versus £93m), Senegal (£160m v £1.4m).
  • Remittances are more significant than aid for some countries. UK remittances are estimated to be a bigger inflow than UK bilateral aid to Uganda (£289m v £140m), The Gambia (£28m v £15m) and Nepal (£111m v £100m). UK remittances to Uganda are estimated to be larger than bilateral aid flows to any low-income country other than Ethiopia.
  • Ethiopia has top spot (though it depends how you look at it). UK bilateral aid to Ethiopia was £326m, exports to the UK were worth £350m, bigger than other reported flows between the UK and low-income countries. Ethiopia was also the largest importer of goods from the UK (£220m). But Ethiopia is the biggest low-income country, by population and by GDP, so we get a different picture taking that into account. UK bilateral aid as a percentage of GDP is lower for Ethiopia (0.5%) than for many other low-income countries, for example UK bilateral aid to Somalia is worth 4.9% of its GDP.

Top reported financial flows between the UK and Low-income countries (2017)

Ranked by % of developing country GDP

Try out the dashboard to see all the data and investigate trends for other income groups, Least Developed Countries and Commonwealth countries.


[i] World Bank threshold for low income countries was $995 or less GNI per capita  (Atlas method) in 2017 https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/906519-world-bank-country-and-lending-groups Comoros, Senegal and Zimbabwe were classified as low income in 2017, but moved to low-middle income in 2018.

[ii] Average GNI per capita in low income countries in 2017 was $752; UK $40,580 GNI per capita; Atlas method (current US$) https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.Cd?end=2017&start=2016  USD-GBP exchange rate in 2017 = 1.29 https://www.ofx.com/en-gb/forex-news/historical-exchange-rates/yearly-average-rates/