Presented by The Rockefeller Foundation
The campaign to end female genital mutilation has been grindingly slow. Now, even the slight gains made over years are under threat.
Also in today’s edition: The end of USAID left a lot of loose ends to tie up, including what to do with its many assets.
I hate acronyms. Don’t get me wrong, I understand the need for them. Try saying the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change three times fast. Yes, UNFCCC is easier, though it’s still a mouthful.
But we seem to shorten everything nowadays — in development, defense, government, private sector, you name it — creating what can feel like an elitist, insider-only language.
But what really grates is when acronyms dull the visceral punch of what they stand for. Perhaps no example illustrates this better than FGM, or female genital mutilation.
I understand the practical rationale for shortening it, but we shouldn’t shy away from the term, or what it entails. Female genital mutilation is just that — mutilation. It involves cutting, sometimes with a crude blade, parts of the female genitalia such as the clitoris, often in the cultural belief that it will keep girls pure for adulthood. In many cases, these girls are then married off to older men, become pregnant, and can suffer horrific side effects from their scarring. They and their babies may die from complications during delivery.
I describe this in stark detail because that’s the very least survivors deserve. Many countries outlaw the practice, but it’s still often done in secret. That’s why organizations set up to prevent the practice and help survivors heal are so important. And in the past, their work has been heavily funded by foreign assistance.
But with donor generosity dwindling — especially in the United States and the United Kingdom — the fight against female genital mutilation could lose critical steam.
My colleague Sara Jerving traveled to Kenya’s Narok County to see the effects of these programs firsthand. There, she details not only how aid cuts are expected to impact grassroots efforts to help these young girls, but also documents their powerful stories.
Stories such as Josephine Rotiken’s. At age 10, she was told to go outside by herself at 5 a.m. for about three hours, without anything to warm her, so that the dark forest chill would numb her body. They didn’t give her painkillers before her aunt cut her.
“It was just the most horrific situation ever,” says Rotiken, now 34.
When she was 12, a dowry was paid to her father to marry her off to a 42-year-old man. But she managed to escape to a rescue center run by Mission with a Vision. The center is a haven for girls escaping FGM, child marriage, and other abuses. It has rescued some 3,000 girls and — thus far at least — never turned one away.
Delve into the mission’s work and the larger campaign against female genital mutilation in Sara’s compelling visual essay.
Read: Steep aid cuts put slow gains against female genital mutilation at risk
+ What’s next for health funding in Africa? Tomorrow, Feb. 20, Sara will be in conversation with WHO Africa chief Dr. Mohamed Yakub Janabi to explore the pathways for reforms and building health security and sustainability across the continent. Register now for the Pro Briefing and send your questions!
The Trump administration’s determination to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in USAID spawned quite a bit of waste — from food aid expiring in Dubai, HIV medication idling on shelves in South Sudan, and contraceptives incinerated in Europe, my colleague Elissa Miolene writes.
Now, we have the first detailed accounting of that fallout. USAID’s independent watchdog just released an audit examining canceled aid programs in a mission that lost every one of its 66 awards: El Salvador.
It paints a mixed picture. The Office of Inspector General found that when those awards were canceled, over $1 million of U.S. government property was handed over to local institutions or retained by implementing partners. That included cars, construction materials, and medical supplies.
In the end, 30 of the 40 items had been donated to local nonprofits, universities, and Salvadoran government institutions. The remaining 10 were retained by implementing partners.
“The fact that there weren't cases of serious waste in the El Salvador context is actually quite a feat,” says a former USAID staffer in that mission, although they described the process as a “mess.”
“The chaos was the constantly shifting guidance from and silence on questions to [Washington] DC, along with having to close out this number of projects simultaneously,” says the former staffer. “Certain actions could only be certified by warranted contracting officers, who took on the risk on behalf of the government, leading to lots of fear of doing anything illegal.”
But perhaps what was worse for USAID staff was the termination of the programs themselves, which ranged from gender-based violence prevention to economic development initiatives.
The wounds are still raw.
“People who spent 20 to 30 years of their lives trying to care for this agency and this work were the ones that had to bring it all down,” the former staffer says. “It was completely cataclysmic.”
Read: USAID El Salvador closed with $1.1M in assets donated, disposed (Pro)
+ A Devex Pro membership lets you get the most out of our coverage of the twists and turns in the U.S. aid sector and the upheaval of USAID.
+ Not yet gone Pro? Starting a 15-day free trial today gives you access to all our exclusive expert analyses and briefings into funding opportunities and philanthropy trends, career resources, industry insights on AI implementation trends, and more.
We often hear about the U.S.-backed Lobito corridor, which connects multiple African countries through rail, road, and port to strengthen trade and supply chains. But the U.S. is looking beyond Lobito to identify an African cross-border infrastructure corridor to pilot and is seeking input from governments and businesses on which project to pursue, officials said in a meeting on the sidelines of the African Union Summit.
Participants said discussions around critical minerals and trade corridors were accompanied by a broader insistence from African officials that new investments must move beyond raw material exports and allow their countries to capture more value from their natural resources, my colleague Ayenat Mersie writes.
It was a theme that repeatedly came up at the summit: The need for the continent to unite and counter extractive or neocolonial patterns.
But U.S. officials sought to reassure their African counterparts that their engagement on the corridor projects would not be exploitative and that investments would deliver tangible benefits to local communities, participants said.
Joseph Sany, former vice president of the Africa Center at the United States Institute for Peace, who attended the meeting, said he was struck by the U.S. officials’ commitment.
“There is a sense, even after talking to the U.S. government representative after the event, [that] they are quite committed to move this forward,” Sany said. “So there is some seriousness; it’s not just for rhetoric.”
Scoop: US looks to pilot next African trade corridor project
ICYMI: Inside Africa’s high stakes push for mineral sovereignty (Pro)
“Shock therapy.” That’s what former NATO secretary-general and former U.K. secretary of state for defense, George Robertson, said the United Nations needs at an event hosted by the United Nations Association-UK to mark the 80th anniversary of the first U.N. General Assembly.
In fact, he had a radical piece of advice for the next U.N. secretary-general: Refuse the job unless the permanent five veto-wielding members of the U.N. Security Council suspend that jealously guarded power to pave the way for long-overdue reforms.
“The United Nations is 80, and so am I this year, and so is [U.S.] President Donald Trump. All of us are 80 this year,” Robertson told Devex. “The United Nations is going to be there, and it’s got to be refreshed, and it’s got to be reenergized, and it’s got to look at the next generation.”
Watch: Ex-NATO chief warns against boosting defense budgets at expense of aid
Related: How much power does the UN secretary-general have to reform the body?
We discussed female genital mutilation, but a less severe — though still serious — medical complication haunts women in low- and middle-income countries: the loss of their breasts due to cancer.
Yet breast reconstruction surgery is often viewed as a luxury, “despite the fact that it addresses profound aspects of identity, confidence, and quality of life following cancer treatment,” write reconstructive surgery experts and advocates Dr. Hanna Atlabachew, Dr. Hellina Legesse Mamo, Anna Santos, and Natalie Meyers in a Devex opinion piece.
“This perception reflects a broader pattern in which women’s health needs are undervalued unless they are life or death,” they argue. “The path forward requires funders, practitioners, and policymakers to embed reconstruction into cancer pathways from the start, invest in training, systems, and infrastructure, and support patient networks to address stigma and disparities.”
Opinion: Breast reconstruction is a matter of equity in cancer care
U.S. aid cuts have effectively gutted the U.S. Agency for Global Media’s internet freedom program, eroding a key effort to counter digital authoritarianism globally as censorship tech becomes increasingly accessible. [The Guardian]
Aid cuts are forcing the World Food Programme to turn away 75% of the 4 million malnourished children in Afghanistan, deepening the hunger crisis and increasing child mortality rates in the country. [AP]
JPMorgan Chase is reportedly in talks to provide banking services for U.S. President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, which is set to oversee Gaza’s reconstruction. [Financial Times]
Sign up to Newswire for an inside look at the biggest stories in global development.