 "‘For convenience and interest’: US ends global contracts to fund HIV, polio & malaria programmes")
As part of the crackdown on US humanitarian programmes, the Trump administration has terminated several contracts that funded HIV, polio, and malaria programmes in some of the most impoverished communities in Africa.
Under USAID, the Department of State supported a large number of healthcare, educational, cultural, and scientific programmes across the world that have attracted the ire of President Donald Trump and his allies. While some US AID programmes are indeed problematic, such as the funding of pathogen research abroad with little oversight and safeguard, much of the USAID activities were centred around humanitarian causes.
The New York Times has reported that the Trump administration terminated around 5,800 such contracts this week, which included refugee aid programmes, tuberculosis clinics, and polio vaccination projects, among others. The email from the Dept of State said the programmes were being terminated for the “convenience and the interest of the US government”.
To highlight how far-reaching the crackdown is, Dr Catherine Kyobutungi, the Executive Director of the African Population and Health Research Center, told The Times, “People will die but we will never know, because even the programs to count the dead are cut.”
Observers have described the Trump administration’s crackdown on foreign aid as a self-goal. They have said that USAID was an instrument of US soft power that complemented hard power. Now that the United States will retreat from developmental and humanitarian projects worldwide, China will sweep in. They have said that China is the only beneficiary from the crackdown on foreign aid.
The terse notes ended funding for some 5,800 projects that had been financed by the United States Agency for International Development, indicating that a tumultuous period when the Trump administration said it was freezing projects for ostensible review was over, and that any faint hope American assistance might continue had ended.
Impact Shorts
View AllAs per The Times, these are some of the major programmes that the Trump administration has terminated:
1. A $131 million grant to the United Nations (UN) polio vaccination programme
2. A $90 million grant for malaria prevention and management, with the distribution of bed nets, treatments, and tests
3. A $131 million grant to UNICEF’s polio immunization program, which paid for planning, logistics and delivery of vaccines to millions of children
4. A $90 million contract with the company Chemonics for bed nets, malaria tests and treatments that would have protected 53 million people
5. A door-to-door campaign for malnourished children in war-ravaged Yemen where one in every five children is critically underweight and another project in Nigeria covering 5.6 million children and 1.7 million women for the treatment of severe and acute malnutrition, with the termination of funding putting around 60,000 children at the risk of imminent death
6. Entire funding to the Global Drug Facility, which amounts to 10 per cent of the body’s funding, which is the main supplying agency to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) tuberculosis medication programme that covers around 3 million people, including hundreds of thousands of children
7. HIV treatment for 350,000 people in Africa’s Lesotho, Tanzania, and Eswatini, by the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation and another project by Helen Keller Intl in six West African countries covering around 35 million people for the prevention and treatment of tropical diseases, such as trachoma, lymphatic filariasis, schistosomiasis, and onchocerciasis
8. A $34 million grant for medical supplies to Kenya, including 2.5 million monthlong HIV treatments, 750,000 HIV tests, 500,000 malaria treatments, 6.5 million malaria tests, and 315,000 antimalaria bed nets
9. Ebola management in Uganda
10. A programme for 87 shelters with 33,000 victims of rape and domestic violence in South Africa
11. A programme providing water to 250,000 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo displaced from violence in the region
12. A programme for childbirth-related care in Nepal covering 3.9 million children and 5.7 million women
13. A project in Sudan that solely runs clinics in a region
14. A project servign 144,000 malnourished children in Bangladesh
15. A malaria-related project covering 20 million in 10 African nations
16. A project providing healthcare, water, and sanitation to 115,000 displaced peoplpe in northern Ethiopia.
17. A grant of over $80 million to the UN aids programe and another grant for a HIV and TB project covering 46,000 people in Uganda
18. A special presidential programme for malaria that covered 12.5 million people in 21 countries last year
Moreover, the Trump administration also shut down the Demographic and Health Surveys, a data collection project in 90 countries that is often deemed the only reliable source of health, mortality, and nutrition data in as many as 90 countries.
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