Much of the international aid community is in a panic, forced to meet the world’s rising needs with much less. For one, President Donald Trump has essentially shut down the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Meanwhile, Britain and France are cutting foreign aid by at least a third. In 2023, the European Union shifted €2 billion (over $2 billion) from development to defense and migration.
These cuts by wealthier countries, predict many aid experts, are having dramatic consequences for the world’s most vulnerable people. At the same time, others see the crisis as a moment for people in aid-recipient nations to reinvent how they can help each other.
“Despite [the USAID] order and its confusion, we are seeing excitement from ordinary citizens and frontline communities,” Elizaphan Ogechi, executive director of the Kenyan community foundation Nguzo Africa, wrote on his organization’s website.
Mr. Ogechi sees an opportunity to tap local philanthropy and other resources, relying on African values of collaboration and empathy. Governments that have depended on foreign assistance, he added, can step up and deliver quality services to their citizens.
Long before Mr. Trump took office, a reckoning over foreign aid was already underway. While international health programs have certainly been transformative, the value of other efforts has been less clear. To many, foreign aid empowers corrupt local elites, imposes unwelcome agendas, and maintains a cycle of dependence.
“This arrangement prevents an absolute catastrophe, but creates a permanent emergency; it keeps people alive, but props up the very regimes that exploit them,” wrote aid expert Joshua Craze in The New York Review of Books.
The changes in foreign aid are “something close to a mental liberation,” The Economist stated, citing past and present African leaders. Rwandan President Paul Kagame, for example, spoke of shaking off “the low expectations that have been attached to Africans.”
Yet a long-expected shift to more self-reliance by many countries has proved difficult. The 2001 Abuja Declaration committed 42 African nations to spending 15% of their budgets on health. Average health spending remains less than half that, The New York Times reported.
In recent years, the international aid community has tried to shift more responsibility for decision-making to local communities, with mixed results. Now that appears likely to happen by default. Some leaders seem ready. Nigeria will have to manufacture its own HIV drugs and test kits, its health minister told the Times. “It may not be as fancy, but at least it will serve.”
In Kenya, Mr. Ogechi is eager to support a necessary mental shift: “It is time to re-imagine the new international model that serves communities with dignity and respect.”
