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Will China gain a foothold in the global south as the United States steps back? That’s the argument Democrats in the Senate are making, with notable stats and stories to back them up.
Also in today’s edition: Why you should care about outcomes-based finance. Plus, howls of protest break out at an international AIDS conference.
+ Upcoming event: Tomorrow, July 16, at 9:30 a.m. ET, we’ll be joined by Abigail Thomson, a senior technical assistance adviser at Dutch development bank FMO. She will talk about how her organization structures and deploys technical assistance to support its investment portfolio — and what that means for NGOs, consulting firms, and other implementers. Save your spot now.
Aid supporters have long warned that if the U.S. retreats from foreign assistance, China will be all too happy to fill the void to boost its global standing. And Democrats in the U.S. Senate just released a 91-page report to make that case.
It’s not exactly a new argument — and critics say it’s an overhyped one — but the report nevertheless makes some striking points, including that China will now surpass the U.S. as the largest bilateral assistance partner in 40 countries.
“Within months, [China was] replacing the programs that we had funded for decades,” said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, referring to the collapse of USAID.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio would beg to differ. “China doesn’t do humanitarian aid,” he told the committee in May. “There’s no evidence whatsoever that China has either the capacity or the will to replace the U.S. in humanitarian assistance, in food deliveries, or in developmental assistance, for that matter.”
Yet the Democrats’ report contains several instances that show otherwise. In Bangladesh, for example, after the Trump administration terminated a $37 million rice and crop program, China contributed enough funding for the World Food Programme to provide 2,100 metric tons of rice, dried legumes, and cooking oil to Rohingya refugees in the country.
“The Trump Administration has failed to articulate an alternative vision of how the United States will counter China in lieu of the influence that the U.S. asserted through foreign assistance,” the report states. “Instead, the Administration has simply eliminated U.S. international reach and leverage, damaged U.S. credibility and cost innocent lives.”
Read: Senate Democrats warn US is retreating and China is rising under Trump
Related: The US aid freeze has left a funding gap. What if China steps in? (Pro)
It’s simple in concept but not always in practice. I’m talking about outcomes-based finance. If you know what it is, great. If you’re a bit hazy on it, we’ve got a primer that’s especially useful because outcomes-based finance, or OBF, is growing.
In fact, according to the World Economic Forum, OBF is valued at $185 billion. And as the trillions of dollars needed to reach the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals prove ever more elusive, OBF is increasingly seen as a key part of the SDG puzzle.
The principle is straightforward: Organizations deliver a service with a given impact, and get paid for what they achieve, writes my colleague David Ainsworth, who moderated a recent Devex Pro Briefing on the topic.
But nothing is ever that straightforward, and OBF often involves several parties all sharing the work, the money, and the responsibility for making things happen. OBF has long faced criticism because of its complexity and cost. Still, Zachary Levey, CEO of Levoca, argued at the Pro Briefing that it increases trust because funders know they will only have to pay out if they get results. He also praised the model for requiring accurate measurement and putting decisions in the hands of experts.
“Of course, there are some fixed costs that there wouldn’t be in other approaches, but that’s because you want to have the rigor of data and evidence and proper evaluation,” added Richard Hawkes of the British Asian Trust. “To have guaranteed success that’s based on evidence and data, with independent evaluation, and 80% of the funding to go to the local partners on the ground — personally, I think that is brilliantly cost-effective.”
Read: What is outcomes-based finance — and where does it go next? (Pro)
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The United Arab Emirates and Senegal are gearing up to host the 2026 U.N. Water Conference, scheduled for early December of that year. Last week, they hosted a high-level preparatory meeting in New York to finalize thematic areas and provide member states, the private sector, and civil society with an opportunity to shape the process, my colleague Kate Warren tells me.
Despite water being one of the safest long-term bets — recession-proof, trend-proof, critical to every SDG — getting real money into the sector still seems to be fighting against the current. Projects tend to be local, fragmented, and complex, with timelines that spook big capital. And because water flows into every other thematic area of development — agriculture, health, climate, to name a few — it often gets treated as everyone’s business but nobody’s budget priority.
Abdulla Balalaa, the UAE’s lead for the conference, tells Devex that they are determined not to repeat that pattern. Instead of showing up in 2026 to negotiate vague commitments, the aim is to go in with a concrete, collaborative plan and use the moment to turn that blueprint into real implementation. The UAE, which knows a thing or two about water scarcity in one of the world’s driest regions, sees this as an existential priority that demands cross-sector buy-in.
Part of that push is a new “Investments for Water” focus. The idea? Get business leaders, heads of state, and finance ministers — not just water or sector-focused ministers — to see water as an investable backbone for everything from climate resilience to food security. That means tackling barriers such as risk, weak project pipelines, and the need for tools such as blended finance that can help bridge the gap.
It also means more coordination and new partnerships that pull in local governments, multilateral development banks, private capital, industry, and communities. The real measure of success? Not another round of pledges, but bankable projects, clear accountability, and a financing ecosystem that is ready to deliver.
When the Rwandan minister of health was called to the stage at the International AIDS Society conference in Kigali, whistles — not the good kind — punctuated the air, and protesters poured down from the bleachers chanting: “We will not be erased.”
They were angry not just over the U.S. cuts to HIV programming, but also at how organizations seemingly kowtowed to Trump’s agenda.
Specifically, the administration dictated the end of programming that included elements of diversity, equity, and inclusion. But a good amount of HIV programming is aimed at high-risk populations, such as LGBTQ+ individuals and sex workers. Instead of pushing back, many organizations acquiesced, said Yvette Raphael, co-founder of Advocacy for Prevention of HIV and AIDS in South Africa.
“Many organizations in this room — we saw you removing transgender,” she said. “We saw you sell us out for funding.”
The protesters rejected the idea of integrating targeted HIV services for high-risk groups into overburdened health systems.
Micheal Ighodaro, executive director of Global Black Gay Men Connect, told the audience that its communities — including gay men, African women, and transgender people — built the global HIV response. “Many of you in this room have jobs because of us,” Ighodaro said. “You try to take us out — how dare you.”
An investigation by Médecins Sans Frontières has concluded that Ethiopian troops were responsible for the 2021 killings of three of its aid workers in northern Tigray, following the government’s failure to offer a “credible account” of what happened. [BBC]
More than 14 million children around the world did not get a single vaccination in 2024, according to WHO and UNICEF. [DW]
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