Sub-Saharan Africa has been a single focus of U.S. foreign aid for decades. The mainland receives more than $8 billion in annual funds to feed hungry children, provide life-saving drugs and provide wartime humanitarian assistance.
In just a few weeks, President Trump and South African-born billionaire Elon Musk burned most of that work to the ground, vowing to fully embark on the guts of the U.S. international aid agency.
“Shut it!” Mr. Trump wrote on social media on Friday, accusing the agency of unspecified corruption and fraud.
Currently, a federal judge stopped some elements of Mr. Trump’s attempt to close the agency on Friday. But the speed and shock of government action have led to chaos, fear and even paranoidness in the USAID office in Africa, the highest recipient of agency funds. Workers are being fired or on leave in large numbers.
With the real scale of the impact, African governments want to know how to fill the huge holes left in important services such as healthcare and education, which weren’t funded by the U.S. until recent weeks. The budgets of aid groups and UN agencies that feed hungry or House refugees have been cut in half, or worse.
So far, the average African is paying the biggest price, with millions of them relying on U.S. aid to survive. But the consequences are also reverberating in the aid sector, which, for better or worse, has been the backbone of Western and African interactions for more than six years. With the collapse of the United States Agency for International Development, the entire model was shocked.
“It’s dramatic and it’s hard to imagine rowing,” said Murithi Mutiga, director of Africa Programs at the International Crisis Group. Mr. Mutiga described the collapse of the institution as “part of the post-Cold War order.”
“Once, the top position of the West was in Africa,” he said. “No more.”
Experts say the abrupt withdrawal of the agency will give much life by creating a huge gap in public services, especially in health care that is invested heavily in the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
U.S. Agency for International Development officials say at least 40,000 health care workers will be out of work in Kenya alone. On Friday, several UN agencies that rely on U.S. funds began providing part of their staff. The United States also provides most of the funding for two large refugee camps in northern Kenya, which have 700,000 people from at least 19 countries.
According to an official notice obtained by the New York Times, the Ethiopian Ministry of Health has fired 5,000 health care professionals recruited under U.S. funding.
“We can’t believe it.” Medhanye Alem of the Center for Victims of Torture, which treats survivors of conflict-related trauma in nine centers in northern Ethiopia, are now closed.
Of the more than 10,000 USAID employees worldwide, only 300 will continue the changes that will be transferred to staff on Thursday night. Only 12 remained in Africa.
Ken O. Opalo, a Kenyan political scientist at Georgetown University in Washington, said the most pressing challenge for many administrations is not to replace American workers or money, but to save the rapidly collapsed American health system. .
Mr Opalo said Kenya, for example, has enough medication to treat HIV patients for more than a year. “But nurses and doctors are letting go of them and the clinic is closing.”
A wider economic shock may also occur in some of the world’s most vulnerable countries.
Charlie Robertson, an economist specializing in Africa, said U.S. aid accounts for 15% of South Sudan’s economic output, Somalia 6% and the Central African Republic 4%. “We can see effective stopping governance in several countries unless others step up replacing the loopholes left by the United States,” he said.
Whether the United States Agency for International Development is truly dead may also be decided by Congress and the U.S. courts, with supporters posing a number of legal challenges. But the Trump administration seems determined to be faster than the challenger.
Mr. Musk and his team directed the agency’s operations in Washington, shutting down its headquarters, firing or suspending 94% of its employees, and its massive aid machines in Africa have been stopped.
In major hubs in Kenya, South Africa and Senegal, U.S. aid officials were labeled as “criminals” by Mr. Musk and then ordered to return to the United States, according to eight U.S. Agency employees or contractors. Anonymous fear of revenge.
On Friday, the Trump administration gave all U.S.A.I.D. staff to pack all their luggage and go home for 30 days, creating turmoil among the families now facing, who evacuated children from school in a short time. If the federal court now reviewing the directive has not overturned it, few people will be able to return to work.
Several U.S. Agency for International Development officials noted that Google’s artificial intelligence system Gemini was recently activated on its internal communications system, and internal video calls made on the Google platform were suddenly set to automatically record.
Officials said they were worried that Musk’s team could use AI to monitor their conversations to make dissidents’ conversations or excerpts that could be weapons to discredit the agency.
Colleagues at the agency this week turned to an encrypted messaging application, Signal, to informally share information. One of the people said people were driven by fear.
On the private side, even senior U.S. Agency for International Development officials agreed that the agency needed a major renovation. In the interviews, some recognized the need to simplify their bureaucracy, even questioned a system of aid that was heavily dependent on U.S. contractors and fostered a destructive culture of dependence among African governments.
The announcement by Secretary of State and Acting Director of the United States Agency for International Development will initially be welcomed by employees. However, officials said it turned out to be a largely a raage building in Haishi. Despite the promise of giving up, many find it impossible to get one.
Many say the worst is that Mr. Musk and the White House deliveries are portraying agents as rogue, criminal institutions that spend officials pursuing their personal agendas. Several people say the attack is wrong and deeply hurts Americans who are trying to alleviate human suffering around the world.
In Nairobi, USAID has about 250 Kenyans and 50 U.S. staff, speaking at a nervous city hall this week.
They fear that the White House conversations within the agency could lead to other Kenyans believing they also benefited from the fraud, he said, attending the meeting.
Like Americans at City Hall, Kenyans are worried that they will be fired. Officials pointed out that there is a major difference between the two groups: Americans are concerned about their country despite Kenyans’ eagerness for their livelihoods.
