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U.S. State Department cuts to foreign aid programs no longer incite alarmed headlines, to the dismay of many in the still-reeling development community. So when the opposite happens — the U.S. giving out foreign assistance money, and a lot of it to boot — it justifies a headline or two.
Also in today’s edition: South Africa’s G20 is over. Now it’s America’s turn.
Questions are still swirling over what U.S. foreign aid will look like moving forward, with the Trump administration not offering much clarity — except for one critical area: health.
The pieces of the administration’s global health strategy are gradually falling into place, first with the release of an actual blueprint and, most recently, the manifestation of that blueprint in the form of a three-year, $150 million grant.
That money is going to Zipline, an American robotics and autonomous drone delivery company, to significantly expand its health care operations in five African countries, my colleague Michael Igoe writes. He notes that the grant is one of the first major new U.S. global health funding announcements since the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID.
It also dovetails nicely with the White House’s “America First” global health agenda, which focuses on promoting U.S. industry while lessening aid dependency overseas.
“This partnership is an example of the innovative, results-driven partnership at the core of the America First foreign assistance agenda,” said Jeremy Lewin, undersecretary of state for foreign assistance, humanitarian affairs, and religious freedom, in a press release.
“With modest U.S. capital investment support, these five countries will become responsible for maintaining and continuing to invest in a transformative American-built health commodities supply chain network,” he added.
The first government expected to sign a contract is Rwanda, while the other four African countries where Zipline operates are Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, and Côte d’Ivoire.
“The governments themselves are in the driver’s seat,” says Caitlin Burton, the CEO of Zipline Africa. She argues that the company’s drone system offers many countries a better alternative to health supply chain systems that have struggled to deliver.
“We don’t expect people to take this giant leap and adopt a disruptive technology because we said so, or because it’s less administratively complex than your big trucking and warehousing system. It’s because it’s going to actually cause patient outcomes to change,” Burton says.
It’s not clear whether the Zipline grant is part of a broader effort to restructure the global health supply chain, but Burton says the company is eager to expand: “This is the kind of model that would allow a lot of other countries that are willing to pay for this to get it.”
Read: State Dept grants $150M to Zipline to triple African drone operations
The Trump administration appears to be slowly but surely engaging with the global health community, not just with its Zipline grant but also with its recent multibillion-dollar contribution to The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
But when it came to South Africa’s presidency of the Group of 20 largest economies, forget about it. U.S. President Donald Trump’s boycott of the G20 summit this past weekend was a blow to South Africa, although the countries that attended did issue a declaration that stood as a multilateral rebuke of Trump’s snub.
But now that South Africa’s G20 presidency is over, what’s next? Ironically, the United States, which takes on the mantle for 2026.
And you can bet the agenda will look very different. The administration spent months knocking the pillars of South Africa’s presidency — solidarity, equality, and sustainability — with Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying the themes were code for diversity, equity, and inclusion, and climate change.
Under the U.S., the G20 will instead focus on growth, deregulation, and energy, with the latter expected to be a priority. Also expect America’s approach to swerve from the global south-oriented lens taken by both South Africa and last year’s G20 president, Brazil. And while South Africa expanded the pool of nations and organizations engaging in the G20 process, the U.S. is expected to shrink it, my colleague Elissa Miolene writes.
“You can almost hold a mirror between the Brazilian first, and now the South African G20 presidencies and their priorities — and the opposite of that appears in what we’re seeing coming from the United States,” says Nabil Ahmed of Oxfam America.
Read: What does the United States’ G20 presidency mean for the world?
ICYMI: G20 summit in South Africa adopts declaration without the US
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Despite finding itself on Trump’s bad side, South Africa emerged from the G20 summit relatively unscathed.
It also notched an important victory for itself beforehand: S&P Global lifted South Africa’s credit rating for the first time in two decades — bringing long-awaited reprieve to a country that highlighted Africa’s high cost of capital throughout its G20 presidency, Elissa writes.
“While South Africa remains below investment grade, the upgrade is significant,” Ronald Lamola, South Africa’s minister of international relations and cooperation, said at the summit. “It lowers borrowing cost, broadens the investor base, and signals renewed confidence in the country's reform trajectory.”
The country wants that for the entire continent of Africa, and it used its G20 presidency to highlight barriers that emerging economies run into, such as the risk profiles that credit rating agencies such as S&P assign to them.
“All of these regulations are supposed to help banks manage risk,” says Olawunmi Ola-Busari of The ONE Campaign. “They’re there for great purpose, and the G20 was made for financial stability. But inadvertently, in some places, [credit rating agencies] have been too stringent or too conservative, and that disincentives investments in emerging markets.”
Read: South Africa wins credit rating boost after two decades
+ Look out for Elissa’s special recap newsletter hitting your inbox later today, which will offer a full retrospective on the G20 summit.
“It ain’t gonna happen.”
— A delegate at the 30th U.N. Climate Change ConferenceWhat isn’t going to happen? According to that COP30 delegate from a high-income country, it’s a tripling of the $40 billion in adaptation finance promised to global south countries back in 2021 during COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland.
Despite that negative, albeit honest, assessment, the final text agreed to at COP30 does include a call to triple adaptation finance by 2035 — an eased deadline from an earlier draft that targeted 2030. However, it does not specify that wealthy countries must take on that financial burden. Instead, it “urges developed country Parties to increase the trajectory of their collective provision of climate finance for adaptation to developing country Parties.”
So what does that mean?
“We don’t really know what that means,” Joe Thwaites of the Natural Resources Defense Council tells my colleague Jesse Chase-Lubitz.
Hey, at least everyone’s being honest, right?
Read: The 3 big outcomes of COP30’s final plenary (Pro)
COP30 recap: What moved, what stalled, and what’s next
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The U.S.- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has ended its operations after nearly six months. [BBC]
Five people have died from the Marburg virus in Ethiopia, with 10 confirmed cases. [Xinhua]
The World Food Programme warns that a surge of extremist violence is driving mass displacement and is pushing parts of northern Nigeria back to famine conditions. [The Telegraph]
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