Maputo, 3 Jul (AIM) – The destruction of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) will throw about 2,500 Mozambicans into unemployment, according to the Minister of Labour, Ivete Alane.
USAID closed the doors of its Mozambican office, as in the rest of the world, on Tuesday. USAID development funding was generally channelled to a multitude of NGOS that ran projects, particularly in health care. Without the USAID funds, most of these projects are closing and dismissing their staff.
On Thursday, Alane told reporters, “from the last meeting I had with the group of organisations who were benefitting from this funding, they spoke of 2,500 jobs, and I believe that’s more or less the right figure”.
She feared those jobs were lost forever, and her hope was that the workers affected would be able to find jobs elsewhere in the Mozambican economy.
In February, the US ambassador himself, Peter Vrooman, admitted that the dismantling of USAID would affect 114 funding initiatives.
USAID was created by US President John F. Kennedy in 1961, and for six decades it enjoyed bipartisan support, with both Democratic and Republican administration continuing to finance the agency. Until Donald Trump returned to office this year, nobody had considered destroying USAID.
But Trump, with the enthusiastic backing of his then ally, billionaire Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, took an axe to USAID, using as his pretext false claims of massive fraud and abuse of funds by the agency. On Monday, two former presidents, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, criticised the Trump administration for its dismantling of USAID.
A study coordinated by the Barcelona Institute of Global Health (ISGlobal) and published in the latest issue of the prestigious medical journal, “The Lancet”warned that the destruction of USAID could halt, and even throw into reverse, “two decades of progress in health among vulnerable populations”.
USAID once provided 40 per cent of humanitarian funding worldwide, with a massive impact on reducing mortality from diseases such as HIV/AIDS and malaria.
One of the study’s co-authors, Davide Rasella, warned that, for many low- and middle-income countries, the shock from dismantling USAID “would be comparable in scale to a global pandemic or a major armed conflict.”
Looking back over data from 133 nations, the researchers estimated that USAID funding had prevented 91 million deaths in developing countries between 2001 and 2021. They also used modelling to project how funding being slashed by 83 percent – the figure announced by the Trump government itself – could affect death rates.
The cuts could lead to more than 14 million avoidable deaths by 2030, the projections found. That number included over 4.5 million children under the age of five – or around 700,000 child deaths a year.
Programmes supported by USAID were linked to a 15-percent decrease in deaths from all causes, the researchers found. For children under five, the drop in deaths was twice as steep at 32 percent.
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