Presented by World Bank
Peace is a double-edged sword for U.S. President Donald Trump.
Also in today’s edition: Can the nonprofit world embrace the unspeakable?
Peacemaker or taker?
A June massacre in Nigeria’s Middle Belt — where Muslim herders and Christian farmers have long clashed over land — killed some 200 people and raised disturbing questions over whether U.S. foreign aid cuts indirectly contributed to the slaughter.
For years, the peacebuilding organization Search for Common Ground had been running a program to deter these types of attacks. In fact, by the end of 2025, its violence prevention platform was set to be transferred to the state government.
But in January, Search for Common Ground’s program was one of thousands terminated as USAID disintegrated.
“If this project was still on, [early warning] signs would have been sent to the relevant agencies for necessary action,” says Haycenth Leva, a program officer at Search for Common Ground. “Action would have been taken before the attack to prevent the attack.”
There’s no real way of knowing whether the attack could have been prevented, but there’s no doubt that peace programs are themselves under attack by a Trump administration dubious of their effectiveness.
When it comes to violence prevention, Search for Common Ground is hardly the only organization feeling a crunch, my colleague Elissa Miolene writes. U.N. peacekeeping operations have been hit by budget shortfalls, in large part due to delayed or nonpayments by the United States.
Ironically, Trump has touted himself as a global peacemaker, brokering ceasefire deals between Hamas and Israel, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, and Thailand and Cambodia.
Those peacekeeping efforts do seem to be having some impact on foreign aid. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio signed off on $400 million for peacekeeping missions in Lebanon and the DRC, while the U.S. recently agreed to pay its share for a U.N. gang-suppression force in Haiti.
There’s also been some bipartisan movement in the U.S. Congress on the Global Fragility Act, or GFA, which creates joint agency strategies to prevent conflict and address its root causes.
For Kevin Melton, a former senior staffer at USAID, resurrecting GFA could codify Trump’s war-ending efforts.
“We have a president who really wants to talk about peace,” Melton tells Elissa. “So let’s do that right. Let’s get it so that we’re actually supporting peace in the right way — not just at the executive level … but to figure out a way to get [peace] done and make sure it sticks.”
Read: The cuts that bleed — what happens when peace programs go dark
+ Devex will be launching The Aid Report, an editorially independent journalism project funded by the Gates Foundation to track the ripple effects of U.S. foreign aid cuts across countries and sectors — from health and education to peacebuilding, agriculture, and climate. We’re collecting verified evidence from those seeing impacts firsthand and those tracking impacts through data, evaluations, or analyses.
If your organization has relevant data or examples of how programs and people are being affected, whether positively or negatively, please email the editor, Kelli Rogers, at kelli.rogers@devex.com. You can also reach Kelli securely on Signal or fill out this short survey.
Time to reset
The fate of the Global Fragility Act — along with U.S. foreign assistance in general — remains murky in a U.S. Congress that can’t even get its act together enough to reopen the government.
But at some point, the U.S. government will reopen — though that will just be the start of budget battles, which could reopen wounds for aid advocates or offer some respite after a year of deep cuts.
Either way, Christy Gleason, chief policy officer at Save the Children US, said hopes should be tempered.
“As I think we've all learned this year, we are not going to go back to what the 2023 budget looked like, or the 2021 budget looked like in that form,” she told me recently during a Devex Impact House session. “But I look at this process as an opportunity to start to reset the table for what can come.”
Still, to say she was optimistic “would be a stretch.” Unlike in years past, this time around, there has not been much input from members of Congress on the foreign assistance budget or the direction of aid work being undertaken by the U.S. State Department, which has absorbed what little remains of USAID.
Gleason said aid organizations will have to confront the uncertainty head-on.
“What’s incumbent on us … is to go, ‘OK, the moment for reacting is over,’” she said. “This is the moment to dust yourself off and make decisions about how we continue to deliver on a mission that Save the Children has delivered on for decades. How do we continue to do that in this era?”
Read: US budget fight is ‘reset’ moment for foreign aid priorities (Pro)
+ Listen: For the latest episode of our podcast series, I sat down with Elissa and Senior Editor Rumbi Chakamba to discuss why U.S.-based international nonprofits are looking into registering sister organizations overseas and other top stories from the week.
Paying homage to profit
Speaking of Devex Impact House, held on the sidelines of the World Bank-International Monetary Fund annual meetings in Washington, D.C., one observer thought a key word was left out of the two-day event: profit.
Specifically, Claudio Tanca, executive director of the G4 Alliance, believes nonprofits shy away from the term, common in the private sector but taboo in public-sector vernacular.
“The concept of ‘return on investment’ was undoubtedly part of the conversations, but what I wanted to see more of is a deeper, more candid discussion about profit itself,” Tanca wrote in a Devex opinion piece.
“It indicates a greater problem in global development organizations: They may support the idea of partnering with the private sector while being morally uncomfortable with attaching themselves to a for-profit motive. Yet what enables such partnerships to work is a mutual benefit that, in the case of any corporation, is based on making a profit,” he writes, arguing that profit and compassion are not mutually exclusive.
“If NGOs want businesses at the table, they must design ventures that allow those businesses to succeed on their own terms, while advancing social goals,” he adds. “Failing to do so could lead to NGOs putting energy into another donor-funded exercise in wishful thinking.”
Opinion: Missing at Devex Impact House — how profit can be purpose’s best ally
+ Explore all the Devex Impact House conversations.
Ending one abuse, ignoring another?
It’s been just over a year since Sierra Leone outlawed child marriage — once among the world’s worst offenders. The 2024 Prohibition of Child Marriage Act was hailed as historic, carrying penalties of 15 years in prison or a $4,000 fine not only for those marrying children, but also for parents, officiants, and even wedding guests.
The push came from first lady Fatima Maada Bio, who almost became a child bride herself at age 11. The law also gives Sierra Leone’s 800,000 child brides the right to annul or void their marriages — a sharp contrast to neighbors such as Guinea, Mali, and Niger, where child marriage rates remain among the highest in the world. “It’s better to be remembered for doing a good thing than to be remembered for protecting a political seat,” says Bio.
But it’s not all positive strides for Sierra Leone. Maternal mortality is still sky-high, gender-based violence is rising, and pressure is mounting to outlaw female genital mutilation, or FGM.
On the latter, Bio has faced sharp criticism. A circumcised woman herself, she told Harvard Public Health last year: “Until people can show me what FGM is doing in Sierra Leone, I’m not part of the conversation.”
Read: The first lady who made child marriage illegal in Sierra Leone
Following the aid trail
Not all official development assistance, or ODA, is created equal, writes our number cruncher Miguel Antonio Tamonan.
Part of it, called core multilateral aid, goes through institutions, such as the United Nations and the World Bank. Everything else is bilateral aid — but only a portion of it is actually spent in line with the needs of people in low- and middle-income countries.
How can that be? Well, it’s complicated, as most things in aid are.
In 2007, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development introduced country programmable aid, or CPA, as a new method of estimating exactly how much ODA flows into the recipient countries.
For expenditure to count as CPA, the OECD says recipient countries must have a “substantial say” over how it is used. CPA therefore excludes forms of bilateral aid that are unpredictable in nature and that the recipients don’t manage themselves, such as humanitarian aid and in-donor refugee costs.
Those parameters change how we look at ODA. Miguel offers a clearer picture by analyzing what donor countries spent on CPA, who received the largest sums, and which sectors were prioritized.
Read: How much aid actually reaches low- and middle-income countries? (Pro)
+ Stay ahead in this crucial time for global development by signing up for a Devex Pro membership with a 15-day free trial today and gain unlimited access to all our expert analyses and briefings with key players, insider insights, funding data and opportunities from top donors, and the Pro Insider — a special weekend newsletter covering our industry’s big moves and the questions surrounding the future of U.S. aid.
In other news
The U.S. will cap the number of refugees it will admit next year to only 7,500, with priority given to white South Africans. [The Guardian]
Qatar is set to welcome more than 8,000 delegates for the second World Summit for Social Development to be held next week. [Arab News]
Global climate adaptation finance fell from $28 billion to $26 billion in 2023, even as the U.N. Environment Programme warns that developing countries will need up to $365 billion annually by 2035 to cope with the impacts of climate change. [The Independent]
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About the author
Anna Gawel
Anna Gawel is the Managing Editor of Devex. She previously worked as the managing editor of The Washington Diplomat, the flagship publication of D.C.’s diplomatic community. She’s had hundreds of articles published on world affairs, U.S. foreign policy, politics, security, trade, travel and the arts on topics ranging from the impact of State Department budget cuts to Caribbean efforts to fight climate change. She was also a broadcast producer and digital editor at WTOP News and host of the Global 360 podcast. She holds a journalism degree from the University of Maryland in College Park.
