Devex Newswire: How US aid cuts have hit the ballot box

We report on the direct and dire impacts of U.S. aid cuts in Uganda and Nepal.

Also in today’s edition: Is tapping private finance to fund development a miracle cure or a dangerous mirage?

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Voting absentee

I’ve always found voting in the U.S. to be an intriguing phenomenon. There are high-profile, intensely polarizing races (ahem, Donald Trump) that attract loads of people to the ballot box. But there are also lower-profile races where candidates struggle to muster voter interest despite the fact that local elections can have more impact on daily life. Even when it comes to fiercely contested presidential elections, a sizable chunk of Americans stay home.

But in many countries, voting isn’t even an option — or it’s a superficial exercise designed to keep a dictator in power. USAID worked for decades to address this democracy deficit. When the agency was dissolved, that work was largely abandoned, with nearly 70% of all U.S.-funded democracy, human rights, governance, and peacebuilding programs terminated by March 2025.

That includes programs in Uganda, where President Yoweri Museveni has been in office for 39 years. His strongest challenger, singer-turned-politician Robert Kyagulanyi — known as Bobi Wine — has galvanized a forceful youth following that’s made him the frequent target of arrests and restrictions.

Uganda has yet to experience a peaceful transfer of power, so the upcoming general elections, slated for January 2026, are a high-stakes event — one that USAID tried to prepare Ugandans for with various voter education activities.

Today, all that has been wiped away, leaving behind concerns for Uganda’s already-dwindling civic space.

“The regime’s aggressive pushback against donor funding for civil society has for years contributed immensely to the shrinking civic space,” says Godber Tumushabe of the Makerere University School of Law. Now, with U.S. funds gone, he adds, their ability to monitor and observe the electoral process in the upcoming 2026 elections has diminished further.

This doesn’t just impact Ugandans; it impacts Americans as well, writes Nakisanze Segawa for Devex’s The Aid Report.

“The U.S. is a trading nation,” Tumushabe points out. “Promoting democracy creates opportunities for their businesses to trade and survive in this [Ugandan] economy.”

It’s also a matter of geopolitical influence, as Uganda pivots toward partners such as Russia and China, says Ahmed Hadji of the Lincoln Institute of Diplomacy and International Relations. “This alignment could undermine the U.S.’s strategic interest in the region,” he argues, “particularly regarding security cooperation and democratic values.”

Read: US aid cuts shrink Uganda’s civic space ahead of 2026 elections

Most vulnerable

A very different program, much farther away, that was also decimated by U.S. aid cuts, illustrates just how wide-reaching those cuts have been.

Nepal was once riddled with some of the highest child malnutrition rates in the world, writes Sunita Neupane for Devex. In 1996, 57% of children under 5 suffered from stunting. Over the past two decades, driven by donor support, government investment, and remittances, Nepal slashed that figure to 25%.

USAID laid the foundation for those strides. Most recently, the agency supported an effort designed to combine nutrition, hygiene, sanitation, infant feeding, and food security interventions across Nepal, with as much as $99 million expected for the period from 2024 to 2029.

But the program was suspended in January 2025 under the Trump administration’s sweeping stop-work order and terminated in April, shocking experts who believed it would continue as part of waivers granted for lifesaving humanitarian aid.

The program’s end has hit children and mothers the hardest, says Prithipal Teli, a nutrition facilitator.

“Children are dying before our eyes,” Teli says.

And improvements are unraveling. Kamala Subedi, who coordinated an earlier USAID-backed nutrition program, remembers encountering a traditional practice where mothers would shape cow dung into the form of a malnourished child and stick it to the wall, believing the child would recover as the dung dried in the sun. Subedi says breaking this deeply ingrained belief was extremely difficult.

Through the program, however, “we created an environment where mothers who never stepped outside their homes were empowered to visit hospitals,” she says. “Now, if they are kept locked inside again, the tragic cycle of malnutrition will repeat in their children.”

Read: A decade of nutrition gains at risk as US-funded systems vanish in Nepal

+ This article is part of The Aid Report. To learn more about it, visit www.theaidreport.us. This project is funded by the Gates Foundation and is an editorially independent initiative by Devex. If your organization has data or examples of how programs and people are being affected by the U.S. foreign aid cuts — whether positively or negatively — please email editor Kelli Rogers at kelli.rogers@devex.com. You can also reach Kelli securely on Signal or fill out this short survey.

END game

January, of course, was when Trump’s stop-work order ground the development sector to a halt, before he swiftly dismembered USAID. Attention has since turned to private money for help, but The END Fund was already ahead of the curve.

The fund, which fights neglected tropical diseases, or NTDs, raises private capital from individuals, corporations, foundations, activist-philanthropists, and institutions — and uses it to cocreate grants with national programs, nonprofits, and other organizations.

It’s a model others are now eyeing more closely. It also dovetails with the push for more integrated national health systems, as articulated in the “Accra Reset,” and calls to work more directly with governments, and increasingly the private sector, through new bilateral agreements, as outlined in the recent “America First Global Health Strategy.”

“We started way before that, but it’s great that the trend is catching up,” Dr. Solomon Zewdu, CEO of The END Fund, tells my colleague Sara Jerving.

One way it’s gone about this is a “collaborative fund” approach that channels resources from multiple donors to nonprofits and local community-based organizations in the global south. “By pooling funds, by engaging governments, we are able to make much more smart investments to really squeeze every penny out of the dollar to make sure that it goes towards impact,” Zewdu says.

Read: The End Fund — a collaborative fund approach to health integration (Pro)

Background reading: The ‘Accra Reset’ — time’s up for the legacy aid system

+ ICYMI, we launched a new series: The future of global health. It explores the consequences of cuts to foreign aid and the efforts to find a new direction for global health. Catch up on our coverage.

COPout?

Not everyone thinks private money is a cure-all. Claire O’Manique of Oil Change International believes concepts such as blended finance — the use of concessional or subsidized public finance to absorb risks and attract additional private investment — are “out of touch with economic reality.”

At the recent 30th U.N. Climate Change Conference, she “watched as global north governments continued to champion private capital mobilization and blended finance, and dodge their responsibility to pay up by claiming private finance can and must fill most of the gap. This ‘private sector-first’ approach has prolonged the fossil fuel era, keeping the tools for a just transition to renewable energy out of reach for many countries and communities,” she writes in an opinion piece for Devex.

She argues that blended finance “does not appear to have the magical ability” to unlock large sums of money — but does appear to pile onto the debt burdens in global south countries.

Instead, she advocates for strategies such as taxing the superrich and polluters, raising public funds, and supporting debt reform.

“Contrary to what global north governments claim,” she writes, “they have all the tools and resources necessary to raise the public funds needed to make the energy transition a reality at home and abroad.”

Opinion: As blended finance fails the energy transition, public money is the answer

In other news

The State Department will move ahead with more than 1,300 layoffs despite a shutdown-ending spending deal, saying Foreign Service employees will still be separated on Dec. 5 because the bill does not require rescinding earlier reduction-in-force notices. [Federal News Network]

A new Pew Charitable Trusts analysis finds global plastic pollution could be cut by up to 97% within 15 years through “reuse and return schemes,” warning that waste and emissions will more than double by 2040 without major changes. [The Guardian]

Elon Musk’s foundation has grown to more than $14 billion but still fell short of required payout levels in 2024, with most of its giving going to charities closely tied to Musk and his business interests. [The New York Times]

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