For most of the modern development era, the world spoke about poor countries in a language designed elsewhere.
They were “recipients.” Others were “donors.” They had “needs.” Others had “solutions.” They were expected to accept policy advice, institutional templates, expert missions, aid conditionalities and reform prescriptions from richer countries that often treated development as a technical problem rather than a historical wound.
South-South cooperation challenges that hierarchy.
It does not claim that developing countries have no need for capital, technology or global institutions. They clearly do. Nor does it pretend that cooperation among developing countries is automatically pure, equal or successful. It is not. But it offers something that the traditional Western aid model has often failed to provide: dignity, ownership and the recognition that countries with similar development histories may understand one another’s constraints better than distant donors.
At its best, South-South cooperation is not charity. It is development by conversation rather than instruction.
That distinction matters today because the old development compact is under pressure. Western aid budgets are shrinking. Debt burdens are rising. Climate finance remains contested. Technology access is becoming geopolitical. The Global South is being asked to decarbonise, digitise, industrialise, secure food systems and protect social stability in a world where capital is expensive and rules are still largely written by the powerful.
In this environment, South-South cooperation is no longer a moral slogan from the postcolonial era. It is becoming a strategic instrument.
What South-South cooperation actually means
The United Nations describes South-South cooperation as cooperation among developing countries based on shared experiences, common objectives, solidarity, respect for national sovereignty, national ownership, non-conditionality, non-interference and mutual benefit. Operationally, it includes the exchange of knowledge, skills, resources and technical know-how among developing countries, including through governments, regional organisations, civil society, academia and the private sector.
This definition is important because it separates South-South cooperation from traditional aid. In the classic North-South model, development often flows from rich donor to poor recipient. In the South-South model, the language is more horizontal: countries share what has worked, adapt it to local needs, and avoid framing assistance as a one-way transfer from superior to inferior.
The United Nations also clarifies that South-South cooperation is not a substitute for North-South cooperation, but a complement to it. That is a critical point. The argument is not that developing countries can solve every development challenge among themselves. The argument is that they should not remain permanently dependent on a model where money, standards, expertise and legitimacy flow only from the rich world.
South-South cooperation therefore sits at the intersection of diplomacy, development, trade, technology and identity. It is about roads and scholarships, but also about voice. It is about financing and capacity building, but also about who gets to define development itself.
Why the model matters now
The timing is not accidental. The global aid architecture is weakening at exactly the moment when developing countries face heavier development demands.
The OECD’s preliminary 2025 data showed that official development assistance by Development Assistance Committee members and associates fell to USD 174.3 billion in 2025, a 23.1 percent decline from 2024 and the largest annual contraction on record. The same OECD assessment noted that ODA had declined for the second consecutive year and projected a further 5.8 percent fall in 2026.
This is not just an accounting issue. When traditional aid falls, poorer countries lose access to grants, concessional loans, technical support, humanitarian relief and long-term development programming. The poorest countries are usually hit hardest because they have the least ability to replace lost concessional finance with market borrowing.
At the same time, the debt crisis is consuming fiscal space. The World Bank’s International Debt Report 2025 found that the combined external debt of low- and middle-income countries reached USD 8.9 trillion in 2024, while 78 mainly low-income IDA-eligible countries owed a record USD 1.2 trillion. It also reported that these countries paid a record USD 415 billion in interest alone in 2024.
This is the background against which South-South cooperation is rising. It is not rising because it has unlimited money. It is rising because the existing development order is failing to meet the scale, speed and dignity requirements of the Global South.
The development problem is now too large for charity
The sustainable development financing gap is enormous. UNCTAD’s Financing for Sustainable Development Report 2024 noted that estimates are converging around USD 4 trillion in additional annual investment needed for developing countries, more than 50 percent above pre-pandemic estimates. It also observed that developing countries pay around twice as much on average in interest on their total sovereign debt stock as developed countries.
This means the development question can no longer be answered by charity, even generous charity. The gap is too large. The needs are too structural. The problems are too interconnected.
A village road is not only a village road. It connects farmers to markets, children to schools, patients to clinics and small firms to supply chains. A digital identity system is not only a technology project. It can shape welfare delivery, financial inclusion, public trust and state capacity. A solar grid is not only a climate project. It is an energy security project, an industrial policy project and sometimes a sovereignty project.
Traditional aid often breaks these problems into donor-friendly categories: health, education, gender, climate, governance, infrastructure. But countries experience them together. South-South cooperation, when done well, can be more practical because it starts from lived developmental complexity rather than donor templates.
India’s experience with digital payments, identity infrastructure, low-cost vaccines, space technology, election management, disaster response, dairy cooperatives, generic medicines and capacity building gives it a particular advantage in this conversation. These are not abstract ideas imported from a seminar room. They are systems built under conditions of scale, scarcity and administrative constraint.
India’s model: capacity, credit and consultation
India has positioned itself as one of the leading advocates of South-South cooperation. Its model is built around three pillars: concessional lines of credit, capacity building and development partnerships driven by the priorities of partner countries.
The Ministry of External Affairs told Parliament in July 2025 that India’s development partnership is based on a consultative model focused on the priorities and needs of partner countries. It also stated that India had extended more than 190 lines of credit worth around USD 12 billion to over 40 African partner countries, with more than 200 projects completed.
India’s capacity-building architecture is equally important. Under the India-UN Global Capacity Building Initiative, launched in its first tranche in August 2025, the Ministry of External Affairs said India provides more than 12,000 ITEC training slots to nearly 160 countries every year across more than 400 specialised courses, with more than 225,000 training slots completed since the programme began.
This is where India’s development diplomacy differs from pure cheque-book diplomacy. India cannot match China’s infrastructure financing scale or the West’s institutional financial depth. But it can offer training, institutional experience, low-cost technologies, public digital infrastructure, health systems knowledge, education partnerships and human capital support.
That is not a small contribution. In many developing countries, the bottleneck is not only capital. It is state capacity.
South-South trade is changing the economic map
South-South cooperation is not limited to aid or diplomacy. Trade among developing countries has become one of its strongest economic foundations.
UNCTAD reported that South-South trade more than doubled from USD 2.3 trillion in 2007 to USD 5.6 trillion in 2023, creating opportunities for developing economies to reduce dependence on traditional trade partners, deepen regional integration and negotiate better trade and financing arrangements.
This is a profound shift. For decades, many developing countries exported commodities to rich markets and imported finished goods, technology and finance from the same centres of power. South-South trade complicates that pattern. It creates new supply chains, new consumer markets, new regional production hubs and new bargaining coalitions.
But it also brings risks. Trade among developing countries can reproduce inequality if larger economies dominate smaller ones. A country can become dependent on China just as it was once dependent on Europe or the United States. South-South trade is not automatically fair. It needs rules, institutions, dispute mechanisms, infrastructure, logistics and industrial policy.
The opportunity is real, but the politics are difficult.
China’s shadow over South-South cooperation
No discussion of South-South cooperation can avoid China.
China has transformed the development landscape through infrastructure lending, trade, industrial capacity and the Belt and Road Initiative. For many countries, Chinese finance built roads, ports, power plants and railways when Western donors were reluctant to fund hard infrastructure. For others, Chinese lending created concerns over debt, opacity, political leverage and strategic dependency.
This is where India’s positioning becomes delicate. India wants to be seen as a partner of the Global South, not as a preacher. But it also competes with China for influence in Africa, the Indian Ocean, South Asia and multilateral forums.
India’s advantage is trust in some areas. It carries the legitimacy of a postcolonial democracy and the credibility of having solved many development problems under conditions familiar to poorer countries. Its disadvantage is delivery speed and financial scale. Partner countries may admire India’s model but still accept Chinese financing because infrastructure cannot be built on sentiment.
Therefore, India’s South-South strategy must be realistic. It should not try to out-China China. It should offer what China cannot easily provide: democratic institutional experience, transparent partnerships, demand-driven capacity building, legal and regulatory training, digital public goods, affordable health systems, English-language technical education and long-term people-to-people ties.
The digital turn: from aid to public infrastructure
The most important new frontier of South-South cooperation may be digital public infrastructure.
India’s DPI story matters because it offers developing countries an alternative to two dominant models. The first is the Silicon Valley model, where private platforms become the de facto infrastructure of public life. The second is the authoritarian surveillance model, where the state builds digital systems without adequate rights protections. India’s model is still imperfect and contested, but it offers a third possibility: public digital rails for identity, payments, data exchange and welfare delivery.
India’s 2026 official description of India Stack says it is built around open APIs and public digital goods that unlock identity, data and payments at population scale, expanding into welfare delivery, health, education, skilling and governance platforms.
For the Global South, this matters because digital systems are now development infrastructure. A country that cannot verify identity, move payments cheaply, deliver benefits efficiently or build trusted data exchange systems will struggle to govern in the digital age.
But this also requires caution. Digital public infrastructure can empower citizens, but it can also expose them to surveillance, exclusion, data breaches and algorithmic injustice. South-South cooperation should not export technology without exporting safeguards. The real value of India’s digital experience lies not only in platforms, but in lessons — what worked, what failed, what must be regulated and what must never be centralised without accountability.
Climate finance and the trust deficit
Climate change has made the development debate sharper. Developing countries are being asked to reduce emissions, protect forests, build resilience, absorb climate shocks and invest in clean energy — often without the historical responsibility or fiscal space of advanced economies.
The OECD reported in May 2026 that developed countries exceeded the USD 100 billion climate finance goal for the third consecutive year in 2024, after also surpassing it in 2022 and 2023. But the same report said mitigation finance continued to dominate, adaptation finance was only one quarter of the total in both 2023 and 2024, and support for low-income countries recovered only partially in 2024 after declining in 2023.
This is precisely why South-South cooperation matters. It cannot replace climate finance obligations from developed countries. Historical responsibility still matters. But developing countries can share adaptation technologies, disaster management models, climate-resilient agriculture practices, solar deployment experience, low-cost cooling strategies, water conservation techniques and early warning systems.
For India, this is a major diplomatic opening. If India can connect solar energy, resilient agriculture, disaster response, digital delivery and capacity building into a coherent development package, it can offer the Global South a practical climate partnership rather than only a negotiating slogan.
The India-UN Fund shows a hybrid route
One of the most interesting forms of South-South cooperation is not purely bilateral. It is triangular or multilateral, where a developing country leads the development partnership with the support of the United Nations or other institutions.
The India-UN Development Partnership Fund is an example. Established in 2017, the USD 150 million fund is supported and led by the Government of India and implemented with the UN system. It supports Southern-owned, demand-driven development projects, with a focus on least developed countries and small island developing states.
This model has several advantages. It gives India diplomatic reach, gives partner countries ownership, and gives projects multilateral credibility. It also avoids the perception that South-South cooperation is merely bilateral influence under another name.
For smaller countries, especially island states and least developed countries, this kind of mechanism matters because it combines respect with execution support. They are not passive recipients of a donor’s agenda. They are partners defining priorities through a multilateral channel.
The counter-view: South-South cooperation has limits
South-South cooperation should not be romanticised.
Many developing countries are themselves fiscally constrained. They cannot fund the scale of development required. Some South-South projects suffer from delays, weak execution, political patronage, poor monitoring and limited transparency. Some lines of credit can create repayment stress if projects are badly designed. Some capacity-building programmes produce goodwill but limited structural change. Some Global South rhetoric hides hard power politics.
There is also a danger that “South-South cooperation” becomes a diplomatic brand rather than a measurable development practice. If every summit, speech and memorandum is labelled South-South cooperation, the concept becomes inflated and vague.
The United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation itself has warned that while South-South cooperation has made important strides, the changing global landscape presents adaptation challenges that could threaten its effectiveness and credibility if it continues with business-as-usual approaches.
This is the right warning. South-South cooperation must become more evidence-based, transparent and accountable. It should publish project outcomes, not just announcements. It should measure whether training improves institutions. It should evaluate whether credit-funded projects generate productive capacity. It should admit failures quickly.
Dignity is not enough. Delivery matters.
What India must do next
India should now move from broad rhetoric to institutional depth.
First, it needs a stronger development cooperation architecture. India’s Development Partnership Administration coordinates grants, lines of credit, technical cooperation and humanitarian assistance across multiple divisions. The OECD’s 2025 profile notes that DPA-I handles lines of credit and concessional loans, DPA-II manages technical cooperation and ITEC, DPA-III manages bilateral grants in several neighbouring countries, and DPA-IV includes a humanitarian assistance and disaster relief procurement cell.
This structure should be strengthened with more project evaluation capacity, faster implementation systems, better public dashboards and deeper collaboration with Indian universities, private firms, civil society and state governments.
Second, India should specialise. It should not try to do everything. Its strongest South-South offerings are likely to be digital public infrastructure, affordable healthcare, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, disaster resilience, elections management, skill development, solar deployment, public finance systems and low-cost space applications.
Third, India must avoid paternalism. The Global South does not want a new big brother replacing old donors. It wants partners who listen. India’s credibility will depend on whether it respects local priorities, hires local capacity, shares technology fairly and avoids treating development cooperation as pure geopolitical competition.
Fourth, India must improve delivery speed. Goodwill can open doors, but delayed projects close them. China’s biggest advantage is often execution. India must build systems that can move faster without sacrificing transparency.
Fifth, India should connect South-South cooperation with domestic economic strategy. Development diplomacy can open markets for Indian education, health, fintech, renewable energy, consulting, agriculture technology and infrastructure firms. But this must be framed as mutual capacity creation, not commercial extraction.
What happens next
Three scenarios are possible.
In the first, South-South cooperation becomes a serious pillar of the new world order. Developing countries build trade networks, share digital tools, coordinate climate positions, reform debt rules and create practical alternatives to donor dependency.
In the second, the model is captured by great-power competition. China, India, Gulf states, Brazil, Turkey and others compete for influence under the language of solidarity, while smaller countries are forced to bargain among rival patrons.
In the third, the concept remains symbolically powerful but institutionally weak. Summits multiply, declarations expand, but projects fail to change lives at scale.
India should work for the first scenario while guarding against the second and third.
The final argument
South-South cooperation is not a rejection of the West. It is a rejection of hierarchy.
It says that development knowledge does not flow only from Washington, London, Paris or Brussels. It can also flow from Delhi to Dakar, from Nairobi to Dhaka, from Brasília to Pretoria, from Jakarta to Colombo, from small island states to climate-vulnerable coastal regions across the world.
The Western aid model often asked: how can rich countries help poor countries?
South-South cooperation asks a different question: how can countries with shared constraints build power together?
That question is more democratic. It is also more realistic.
The Global South does not need charity as a substitute for justice. It needs finance, technology, fairer rules, institutional voice and development partnerships that respect sovereignty without ignoring accountability.
If South-South cooperation can deliver that, it will become one of the defining diplomatic ideas of the twenty-first century.
