Latest news with #aidcuts
Japan Times
16 hours ago
- Business
- Japan Times
From Nigeria to Pakistan, TB testing 'in a coma' after U.S. aid cuts
At a tense meeting in Nigeria's capital, Abuja, health workers pored over drug registers and testing records to gauge whether U.S. aid cuts would unravel years of painstaking work against tuberculosis in one of Africa's hardest hit countries. For several days in May, they brainstormed ways to limit the fallout from a halt to U.S. funding for the TB Local Network (TB LON), which delivers screening, diagnosis and treatment. "To tackle the spread of TB, you must identify cases and that is in a coma because of the aid cuts," said Ibrahim Umoru, coordinator of the African TB Coalition civil society network, who was at the Abuja meeting.
The Independent
19-05-2025
- Health
- The Independent
Aid cuts forcing people in 70 countries to miss out on much-needed medical care, WHO warns
People in at least 70 countries are missing out on much-needed medical treatment thanks to aid cuts by the US and other nations, the head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) director has said – in a stark warning about the colossal impact of these moves. The Donald Trump -sanctioned slashing of US-funded programmes under the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is the most prominent example. But Germany, France and the Netherlands have also taken an axe to aid spending. While the UK is set to cut foreign assistance spending by billions of pounds. "Patients are missing out on treatments, health facilities have closed, health workers have lost their jobs, and people face increased out-of-pocket health spending," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in an address to the World Health Assembly. 'Many ministers have told me that sudden and steep cuts to bilateral aid are causing severe disruption in their countries and imperilling the health of millions of people,' Dr Tedros added. The Independent has previously reported how the US and UK cuts are projected to lead to millions more people dying from Aids, an increased risk of famine, and falling access to clean water and education as a result of aid cuts. Meanwhile, the WHO itself is also facing more than a billion US dollar reduction to its budget over the next two years, as its biggest contributor the US is withdrawing funding as part of Trump's plans. As part of the World Health Assembly, the 194 WHO member states will have to deal with an already slimmed-down budget of $4.2 billion (£3.1bn) for 2026 and 2027. That is 20 per cent less than the $5.3bn originally proposed and amounts to $2.1 billion a year. "2.1 billion dollars is the equivalent of global military expenditure every eight hours," Dr Tedros told delegates. But the cuts will mean lsoing staff, the WHO's director general confirmed, with a current plan to cut the agency from 76 departments to 34. 'The organisation simply cannot do everything member states have asked it to do with the resources available today,' he said. As the United States prepares to exit the organisation, China is set to become the biggest provider of state fees - one of the WHO's main streams of funding alongside donations. The WHO conducts a range of activities from developing treatment guidelines and checking the safety of medicines to coordinating countries' emergency responses. It was heavily criticised by the the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response for its response to Covid-19, in particular for not declaring a global emergency sooner. At the same time it has faced criticism - and swirling conspiracy theories - from people who believe global agencies have too much power over national governments. Amid the chaos, there is a glimmer of opportunity, however, as 'many countries also see this as an opportunity to leave behind an era of aid dependency and accelerate the transition to sustainable self-reliance based on domestic resources,' Dr Tedros said. In the UK, as in several other countries, aid cuts are being driven by a decision to spend more on defence. Dr Tedros asked the room to consider that his agency's budget shortfall represented the price of global military spending, 'every eight hours,' and urged countries to also consider preparing for, 'an attack from an invisible enemy'. He pointed out that the Covid pandemic killed an estimated 20 million people and wiped $10 trillion from the global economy. The WHO member states are expected to finalise an agreement on Tuesday which will set out how the world should react to a future pandemic.
The Guardian
18-05-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on Britain's new aid vision: less cash, more spin. The cost will be counted in lives
Last week, the government justified cutting the UK's development budget from 0.5% to 0.3% of gross national income – the lowest level in more than 25 years – by claiming Britain's role is now to 'share expertise', not hand out cash. With a straight face, the minister responsible, Jenny Chapman, told MPs on the international development committee that the age of the UK as 'a global charity' was over. But this isn't reinvention – it's abdication, wrapped in spin. No wonder Sarah Champion, the Labour MP who is chair of the committee, called Lady Chapman's remarks 'naive' and 'disrespectful'. Behind the slogans lies a brutal truth: lives will be lost, and Britain no longer cares. Dressing that up as the 'new normal' doesn't make it less callous. Kevin Watkins of the London School of Economics analysed the cuts and found no soft-landing options. He suggests charting a sensible course through this wreckage, noting that harm from the cuts is inevitable but not beyond mitigation. Dr Watkins' proposals – prioritising multilateralism, funding the global vaccine alliance (Gavi) and replenishing international lending facilities – would prevent some needless deaths. Ministers should adopt such an approach. The decision to raid the aid budget to fund increased defence spending was a shameful attempt to cosy up to Washington. The cuts were announced just before Sir Keir Starmer's White House meeting with Donald Trump, with no long-term strategy behind them. It's a deplorable trend: globally, aid levels could fall by $40bn this year. The gutting of USAID, the world's biggest spender on international development, by Elon Musk, was less fiscal policy than culture-war theatre. Foreign beneficiaries don't vote, and liberal-leaning aid contractors lack clout, so dismantling USAID shrinks 'globalism' while 'owning the establishment'. But the real casualties lie elsewhere. Memorably, Bill Gates said the idea of Mr Musk, the world's richest man, 'killing the world's poorest children is not a pretty one'. Countries that built health systems around USAID now face a reckoning. It wasn't just cash – it sustained disease surveillance, logistics and delivery. Ironically, much of it never left American hands, absorbed by US private interests. In the UK, University of Portsmouth researchers say aid increasingly serves foreign policy, not development. It's not just ineffective – it's cynical. Aid should change lives, not wave flags. All this as poor nations' debt crisis deepens. Without global reform, the Institute for Economic Justice warns, African nations face a cycle of distress blocking investment in basic needs. The UK recasts withdrawal as progress – holding up Ethiopia and Zimbabwe as model partners. But Georgetown University's Ken Opalo makes a cutting point: in diplomacy, when the music stops, those who outsourced ambition get exposed. Aid dependency, he argues, has hollowed out local ownership. With little planning, many governments now face a choice: take over essential services or cling to a vanishing donor model. Politicians should choose their words carefully. The former Tory development secretary Andrew Mitchell rightly criticised Boris Johnson's 'giant cashpoint in the sky' remark for damaging public support for aid. Labour ministers are guilty, too. Britain has replaced moral leadership with metrics, and compassion with calculation. The policy's defenders call it realism. But without vision, it's just surrender – leaving the world's poor to fend for themselves, forced to try to survive without the means to do so.
The Independent
13-05-2025
- Business
- The Independent
UK cuts to international aid will have huge impact, minister admits
The UK's large-scale aid cuts will have a 'huge impact', the new development minister has admitted to MPs – but that the days of viewing Britain 'as a global charity' are over. Jenny Chapman replaced Anneliese Dodds as development minister in February. Dodds resigned in protest at the prime minister's plan to cut aid spending from 0.5 per cent to 0.3 per cent of the UK's gross national income (GNI) – a measure of the nation's total wealth. That amounts to roughly £6 billion cut from a current budget of £15.4bn. Addressing the international development select committee, Baroness Chapman said the UK needed to 'sharpen our focus' on health, the climate crisis and humanitarian aid in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan, 'which is actually where the public expects us to lead'. But this would likely come at the expense of programmes around women and girls ' education, she said. 'There will be a huge impact, I'm not pretending otherwise,' Chapman said 'I can't promise to protect every good programme'. Baroness Chapman went on to claimthere was an "absolute crisis" in public support for international aid, adding that "many of our partner countries" also wanted to "move on from this model". Monica Harding, the Liberal Democrat spokesperson on the committee, said other polling suggested UK residents did support foreign aid when it is, 'within their interests, when it supports defence and security and soft power'. Arguing that the UK needed to focus more on sharing expertise than providing cash, Baroness Chapman said: "While our commitment to helping those living through emergencies is unwavering - for countries developing, we need to be an investor and not just a donor. "It's about partnership and not paternalism." An explicit plan to spend less on gender might appear to mirror the rhetoric coming from across the Atlantic, as Donald Trump has ruthlessly slashed any spending he considers to be in the service of 'gender ideology.' millions on the brink of famine to derailing the end of the AIDS pandemic, driving millions of preventable deaths. But Chapman was keen to put a distance between Labour's plans and the US's blitz on all aid - especially any project that has a whiff of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Asked by Harding whether these plans were 'just following the US', Chapman denied the claim. 'We have made our choice for very very different ideological reasons. This is about necessity and having to shift some spending to defence,' Baroness Chapman said. 'We maintain our commitment to go back to 0.7 [per cent] when we can'. In the future, the UK should offer its 'expertise' from its education, health, tech and financial sectors to support countries to build their own systems, Chapman said. The alternative would be to 'salami slice without strategy,' which would be 'wrong'. An analysis by Save the Children previously shared with The Independent found 'savage' cuts to UK foreign aid would leave 55.5 million of the world's poorest people without access to basic resources. Chair of the international devleopment committee, Sarah Champion, said development money - which usually sits in a different pot from humanitarian money - is 'how you prevent conflicts in the future. It is how you prevent terrorists in the future'. The plans will be finalised by 11 June when the spending review, setting out government departments' budgets, closes. Baroness Chapman also pushed back on estimates from The One Campaign which suggested UK aid cuts could lead to 600,000 preventable deaths and 38 million fewer children being vaccinated, saying the government hadn't got the point of making those decisions yet. More clarity on where the UK's aid cuts will fall will come in the summer.
The Independent
08-05-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Trump is slashing US spending on climate aid. But all is not lost
Millions of the world's poorest people are set to suffer the consequences of Donald Trump 's decision to cut US aid – with funding for developing nations to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis expected to plummet to zero this year. Leaked Congress files show that more than 80 per cent of aid projects supported by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) have had their funding terminated, while the Trump administration has made clear that climate-related products are one the lowest priority areas. Africa – home to 23 of the world's 28 poorest countries – will be the hardest hit by the cuts, Mohamed Adow, from the Nairobi-based climate think tank Power Shift Africa, believes that these cuts 'could not have come at a worse time for Africa'. 'They will directly affect initiatives that help communities build resilience against climate impacts, such as droughts, floods, and desertification,' he says. 'In Kenya and Ethiopia, for instance, USAID has been pivotal in promoting sustainable agriculture practices and water management systems that are crucial in the face of increasingly erratic weather patterns, while in Zambia and Zimbabwe USAID has been supporting water conservation and renewable energy projects.' The leaked files show numerous terminated projects that are examples of what Adow suggests, including a $35 million (£26m) project improving climate resilience in Ethiopian pastoral areas, a $40m project boosting water management systems in Kenya, and a $25m project in Zambia pushing low emission alternatives to cooking with charcoal. This marks a dramatic shift from the last few months of Joe Biden's presidency. At the end of 2024, the US government announced record climate finance provision , totalling $11 billion: A figure seven-times greater than the $1.5bn recorded in the first year of the Biden Administration in 2021, which came in the wake of Trump's first term. In November, meanwhile, countries gathered in Baku, Azerbaijan, at the COP29 Climate Conference, where they came up with a brand new global target for the world's developed countries to collectively provide at least $300 billion in climate finance to the world's poorest countries by the year 2035. That total is nearly triple the $115.9bn that countries provided in 2022 – the last year for which there is complete global data – with the extra billions set to provide a crucial lifeline for developing countries looking to both adapt to their rapidly changing climates. But while the about turn from the US has created worrying funding gaps in the short term, experts in the field have said that there is still hope that other countries of the world will be able to rally round and meet that multi-billion dollar climate finance target. For starters, there is the fact that the US has not traditionally been one of the largest contributors to climate finance. Japan, Germany, the EU and France – which collectively provided more than 50 per cent of global climate finance aid in 2022 – all gave significantly more than the US that year to help developing nations adapt to a changing climate. Even the Biden-increased spend of $11bn in 2024 would still only come third on the 2022 list after Germany and Japan. 'Based on its historical emissions or its GDP, the US should be responsible for some 40 per cent of climate finance,' says Ian Mitchell, from the Center for Global Development (CGD) think tank. 'But in most years, it has provided less than 10 per cent of the total.' With the US out the picture for at least the next four years, there is hope that other countries will feel motivated to fill in the gap . 'Other countries in Europe have also cut their aid budgets, but there is particular pressure on them to maintain their climate finance numbers', says Gaia Larsen, director of climate finance access at the World Resources Institute (WRI) research NGO. Then there are emerging economies like UAE – which runs Alterra, a $30bn climate-focused investment fund – and China, which announced in September that it would invest $50bn in infrastructure in Africa over the next three years. However, experts warn that the kind of loan-based finance that these sources offer is no match for the financing that USAID used to give, much of which came in the form of grants. For Bella Tonkonogy, an expert at the Climate Policy Initiative think tank, perhaps the biggest cause for optimism can be found in the developing countries themselves, many of which have rapidly-growing economies and increasingly powerful financial institutions of their own. 'Countries like Vietnam and the Philippines are now building renewables with a lot of local finance,' says Tonkonogy. 'Countries including Kenya have also said that they want to shore up their own finances and become less reliant on donor countries. But even before Trump's latest term in the White House is up, the US cuts to climate aid may never be quite as drastic as President Trump intends due to a quirk in how foreign aid is tracked by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which is the forum of wealthy nations that oversees and tracks foreign aid spending. 'Climate' is not an aid category in itself, according to the OECD, but is instead a secondary category that can be tagged to other aid types, such as energy, health, or development. So funding of some projects could continue, even if it is not marked as being climate-based. 'Members of the [Trump] administration have said that they are still interested in investing in new markets... And investing in renewable energy [is] a big part of that,' says Tonkonogy. Where the US is investing in infrastructure abroad, it seems likely that the administration will also look to make that infrastructure weather- and disaster-resilient, which will be their way of ensuring that investments are suitably-adapted to changes in the climate, even if they never acknowledge it as that, adds Tonkonogy. Which will help the countries in which it is built. The US government is, for example, a major financial backer via the IDFC of the Lobito Rail Corridor, which is a huge infrastructure project connecting cobalt and copper mines in Zambia and DR Congo to the port of Lobito, Angola, in a project seen as seeking to counter growing Chinese influence in the region. The US ambassador to Angola recently confirmed that plans have so far not been affected by Trump's spending cuts. 'Climate resilience' remains a key aspect of how the project is being designed and implemented. 'There is one scenario where the US government just completely pulls back and stops investing in anything overseas,' suggests Tonkology. 'But if the US does continue to invest abroad, it is likely that there will be at least some tacit financial support of climate [issues].'
