The foreign ministry’s official development assistance(ODA) budget for next year has been earmarked at some two trillion won, up 18-and-a-half percent from this year.

A ministry official revealed the figure to reporters on Tuesday while explaining the budget allocated for the ministry for 2023.

The ministry’s ODA budget includes spending plans for the Korea International Cooperation Agency’s collaborative projects in partner countries as well as contributions made through international organizations.

The budget is significantly larger than the one-point-three trillion won that was allocated back in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic broke out.

Despite the increase, the grant-type aid budget for Myanmar, where the local military conducted a coup, and for Afghanistan, where the Taliban are in power, will remain similar to this year when such aid was sharply slashed.

A notable change was the deletion of ODA funds for a project to inspect the sea off Myanmar as part of an investigation into a Korean Air plane explosion in 1987, which had an allocation of some 620 million won in 2022.