Saikou Jammeh
The writer is a reporter at The New York Times
The United States is cutting almost all its spending on aid. The biggest loser will be Africa.
For years, sub-Saharan Africa has received more US aid money than any other region — except for 2022 and 2023, when the United States came to Ukraine’s aid after the Russian war.
In 2024, $12.7 billion of $41 billion in American foreign assistance went straight to sub-Saharan Africa, and billions more went to global programmes — including health and climate initiatives — for which Africa was the main beneficiary.
Practically all of that aid is set to disappear in the wake of President Donald Trump’s decision to dismantle the US Agency for International Development. The cuts are expected to undo decades of efforts to save lives, pull people out of poverty, combat terrorism and promote human rights in Africa, the world’s youngest, fastest-growing continent.
Trump officials have accused the agency of waste and fraud. In his speech to Congress, Trump railed against aid to Africa, saying the United States was spending millions to promote issues “in the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of.”
The Supreme Court ruled that USAid and the State Department must pay contractors as much as $2 billion for work already completed, but the ruling will have little effect on the wider consequences of eliminating most US foreign assistance.
A New York Times examination of government spending data found that most aid has been spent on humanitarian, health and disaster assistance. In many African countries, it will be harder to accurately track the consequences of these tragedies, since a major programme focused on collecting global health data has also been axed.
Surveys show that Americans are divided on whether foreign aid is valuable or effective. But W Gyude Moore, a scholar and former Liberian minister, said the way it is being dismantled is “almost gratuitous in its cruelty.”
Seven of the eight countries most vulnerable to the USAid cuts are in Africa (the other is Afghanistan). Here is a breakdown of what Africa stands to lose as the United States draws down its aid contributions across the world.
Africa is struggling with several humanitarian crises marked by extreme hunger and violence, from warring factions in Sudan to armed groups ravaging eastern Congo and a wave of extremist violence destabilising the Sahel.
Last year, the United States spent $4.9 billion helping people flee such conflicts or survive natural disasters like floods and hurricanes.
The biggest American humanitarian programme in the world in 2024 was in Congo, where the United States spent $910 million on food, water, sanitation and shelter for more than 7 million displaced people, according to Bruno Lemarquis, the United Nations’ humanitarian coordinator in the country.
As a donor, the US was “ultra dominant” in Congo, Lemarquis said, paying 70 per cent of the humanitarian costs last year. Now 7.8 million people stand to lose food aid, and 2.3 million children risk facing deadly malnutrition, he said.
Last week, the UN said Congo needs $2.54 billion to provide lifesaving assistance to 11 million people in 2025.
The United States was also the biggest donor last year to Sudan, where it funded over 1,000 communal kitchens to feed starving people fleeing a brutal civil war. Those kitchens have now shuttered, and Sudan is facing “mass deaths from famine,” according to the United Nations human rights chief, Volker Turk.
For decades, the United States led efforts to combat famine worldwide, but now famines will likely multiply and become deadlier, according to the International Crisis Group, an independent, non-government organisation that seeks to prevent and resolve conflict.
In 2003, former president George W Bush created the US President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, which has since invested over $110 billion to fight HIV and Aids globally.
The programme’s primary focus has been sub-Saharan Africa, where the majority of people living with HIV reside - 25 million of the globe’s 40 million patients.
For many African governments facing limited resources, the programme has been a lifeline, filling gaps in national health budgets, paying healthcare workers and putting millions of HIV patients on antiretroviral drugs.
In countries where the programme was active, new HIV cases have been reduced by over a half since 2010, according to the UN. But experts have warned the cuts could reverse that progress: more than half a million people with HIV will die unnecessarily in South Africa alone, according to one estimate.
But the US funding on global health extends beyond HIV. The US President’s Malaria Initiative, also launched by Bush, has spent over $9 billion to fight malaria since inception in 2005.
Nigeria and Congo, which together account for over a third of the world’s malaria infections, are both major recipients of US global health funding, and Nigeria relies on it for about 21 per cent of its national health budget. - The New York Times
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