'Like a big funeral': USAID cuts leave local partners fighting to survive

When the Trump administration halted funding for Yo’ Care South Sudan — a local organization serving 10,000 people with its HIV/AIDS programming alone — the impact was swift and devastating. Nearly 1,000 women lost access to the medications they needed to survive. Another 9,000 people were stripped of the testing, preventative treatment, and health care services they had relied on for years. Five tons of health commodities have sat frozen in Yo’ Care’s clinics. And now, the organization has been forced to lay off more than 90% of its staff. “They’re asking us: How are we going to continue surviving without this medication we need every day? How are we going to protect ourselves?” said Yohanis Riek, who has led Yo’ Care since 2009. “As indigenous NGOs, we have nowhere to go.” Yo’ Care is just one of many local organizations struggling to survive in the wake of USAID’s dismantling — and one of many dealing with a sharp break in USAID’s years-long push toward localization. For over a decade, the agency has attempted to steer more money and decision-making power to local groups, including through the Journey to Self-Reliance, a localization approach under the first Trump administration. But in less than two months, all of that work has been shattered — gutting the local groups that for years have been leveling themselves up to partner with the U.S. Agency for International Development. “The past month has been like a big funeral. A big funeral across the entire country, and a big funeral across the world,” said Moses Isooba, the executive director of the Uganda National NGO Forum. “USAID was the pace-setter on locally led development. Now that the pace-setter has now gone away, what we are most likely going to see is not only the rolling back of budgets, but the rolling back on the whole idea of localization.” The death of a bipartisan push The U.S. government has been attempting to localize its foreign aid funding for decades. It’s been a priority for both Republican and Democratic administrations — and during the first Trump presidency, USAID’s direct local funding for HIV/AIDS programs jumped by 81%. It was something celebrated by Max Primorac, a former USAID adviser, in Project 2025. Primorac wrote the conservative blueprint’s chapter on USAID — and despite calling for deep cuts to the agency’s budget, Primorac repeatedly highlighted the need to invest in local groups. He also noted the Journey to Self-Reliance, a localization approach established by Trump-appointed USAID Administrator Mark Green in 2018. “‘Localization’ is a buzzword within the aid community but correctly assumes that more funding through local organizations produces better aid outcomes,” Primorac wrote in Project 2025. “Before advancing a new program, the agency should be required to assess existing local activities to avoid undercutting or duplicating them. At every opportunity, USAID should build on existing local initiatives.” It was a view shared by former USAID Administrator Samantha Power, who committed the agency to channel 25% of eligible funding toward local groups during the Biden administration. By the time Power left office, the agency was still far from that target — but in just three years, USAID had doubled the amount of money going toward local organizations, reaching $1.9 billion by the end of 2024. “This is something that’s been a priority for many years,” said one former USAID official, who was involved in the agency’s localization work during the Biden administration. “That’s because there’s a recognition that if work is going to be effective, and if it’s going to be sustained, it has to be locally owned.” Just before Donald Trump took office, USAID was reaching nearly 2,300 local and regional partners, a 48% jump in the local partner count since 2021. But within hours of his return, Trump froze almost all foreign assistance across the world — paralyzing both small and large organizations alike. The ripple effects For Yo’ Care South Sudan, that meant receiving a stop-work order — and then a termination notice — for both its USAID-funded projects. That included the largest program in the organization’s portfolio, which had been serving thousands with HIV prevention, treatment, and other health services since November 2020. “These [anti-retroviral medications] are lifesaving, and clients were depending on them,” Riek told Devex. “Now, how are people going to protect themselves?” Despite U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s claims that programs delivering lifesaving humanitarian aid — such as HIV/AIDS medications — were exempt from the funding freeze, Yo’ Care’s health initiatives were terminated in early February, well before the administration slashed nearly 10,000 more programs en masse. “We don’t have access to overseas donors,” said Riek, speaking to Devex in late February. “The majority of local NGOs will cease to exist completely, and the communities they’re serving will suffer for it.” Overnight, Riek had to terminate or furlough all but four members of his 53-person staff — and for weeks, five tons of health commodities sat stranded in Yo’ Care’s clinics throughout the country. Though some of its staff worked without pay to keep the doors of those clinics open, the systems Yo’ Care had established to reach those most at risk were almost immediately severed. “Female sex workers are often dealing with stigma, which is why we reach them in different ways,” said Riek, describing how Yo’ Care uses peer education networks to collect HIV medications and deliver them to those who need it. “The project was forced to stop, so we were not able to do this. And while those who have the confidence to come to the clinic could collect them, most will not.” “Now, we know that the United States is not a reliable partner.” --— Moses Isooba, executive director, Uganda National NGO Forum At first, USAID told Yo’ Care that it would be required to ship its medications back to Juba, a mandate that would have cost the group more than $15,000. Then, the agency backtracked, stating it could donate the commodities instead. And now, the government of Lakes State — where Yo’ Care has one of three clinics — told the organization to prepare a list of everything it owned “for disposal,” according to a letter reviewed by Devex, prompting concerns that the regional government could seize its assets. “We're in the hospitals, and all our assets are based in the hospital — so why would they want to take them out of it?” Riek asked. “It is in the hospital that they would benefit the community as a whole.” Yo’ Care is far from alone. The Network for Empowered Aid Response, or NEAR, surveyed more than 100 of its members, all of whom are local and national civil society groups. By Feb. 10, more than 80% of those organizations had seen their programs paused because of the funding freeze. As a result, more than 13.5 million lost access to those organizations' services. That was one month before Rubio announced his team had terminated 5,200 programs across USAID, slicing away more than 80% of the agency’s work — including awards that had previously been declared exempt from Trump’s funding freeze due to their delivery of lifesaving humanitarian aid. “All along, perhaps, we were fooled. This was not a partnership. This was just for the benefit of the U.S.,” said Isooba, whose network consists of more than 750 civil society organizations throughout Uganda. “Now, we know that the United States is not a reliable partner.” Lost cause For many organizations, working with USAID meant investing in the systems, skills, and staff to align with the world’s largest bilateral aid agency. Before the agency was dissolved, USAID often gave awards much larger than many local organizations were used to — and as part of its localization efforts, USAID’s staff worked with nonprofits to help build them up. “The U.S. government would go in, do an audit of an organization’s capacity, and say, these are all the things you have to invest in and do differently in order to get money from us,” explained Allyson Bear, a former USAID foreign service officer who now runs VennHealth, an international development consulting company. “They have to make all of these investments, they become larger, operationally more complex. That comes with costs, and those costs are recovered by implementing the work that they're doing for the U.S. government.” “But when that tap gets turned off, they no longer have the ability to pay for this operational infrastructure that the U.S. government has asked them to set up,” she said. “And that immediately puts them into a crisis.” Isooba has seen that play out across the over 750 members of the Uganda National NGO Forum. For some, that meant hiring an accountant of a certain level; for others, it meant recruiting certain staff to deliver a complex project. Either way, the vast majority of USAID’s projects have been dissolved, including those that local organizations ramped up to provide. “You have all these human resources that were there to deliver on an agreement you no longer have,” Isooba told Devex. “That’s like buying an air ticket, but then you end up not traveling because the airline is suddenly out of business.” In most cases, those investments were neither refundable nor cheap. Many organizations are now tangling with local labor laws and trying to assemble mandatory severance packages with a budget going into the red. Others are struggling to get out of their office spaces and are facing both legal and physical threats from internet companies, landlords, or other service providers they previously had held contracts with. “Oftentimes, these organizations will take on an award that puts them into a whole new category, and they’ll have to grow and expand and mature just to be able to take that amount of money,” Bear said. “Immediately, that makes the U.S. government their largest source of funding. And they become predominantly reliant, by design, on the U.S. government.” By early March, more than 20% of nonprofits and 27% of for-profits had less than one month of cash left, according to a survey of over 800 people in the sector by Humentum and the Accountability Lab. Seven weeks after the foreign aid freeze began, almost 80% of organizations still had not found alternative sources of funding — including Yo’ Care South Sudan. “The very existence of the organization is at risk,” Riek said. “We’ll likely be okay until May. But at that point, we may have to close altogether.”