What African experts say must change about US foreign aid

Frenzied, cutthroat, and chaotic — that’s how recent efforts to dismantle the U.S. foreign assistance infrastructure have been described. The Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development left no time for planned transitions for fund recipient governments and organizations implementing programming, nor a wind-down for those receiving aid to identify other options for services they were receiving. But some argue that parts of the U.S. foreign aid legacy are being remembered through rose-colored glasses: While American aid provided enormous benefits to the world, it also came with baggage. Devex spoke with four development and private sector experts on the African continent who offered their candid assessments of where U.S. foreign assistance has fallen short — and what changes are needed. Despite the dramatic cuts, U.S. foreign aid is expected to continue — albeit in a different form. While the Trump administration slashed the majority of USAID’s global programming, some programs will continue — administered by the U.S. State Department. The number of surviving programs remains in flux, especially as some cancellations have been reversed after being deemed erroneous. Current estimates suggest that between 900 and 1,000 programs will continue. Built for the behemoths Experts told Devex that U.S. donor aid often hasn’t aligned with African government or local community priorities and that it has often created dependencies rather than instilled self-reliance. In the health space, the U.S. government favored targeting certain diseases, such as HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria — but didn’t prioritize areas such as noncommunicable diseases or mental health. For example, there are stand-alone HIV clinics with their own data systems and supply chains. “The parallel structures have become so dominant that the rest of the system is just like a skeleton,” said Dr. Catherine Kyobutungi, executive director of the African Population and Health Research Center. The system was also “almost exclusively designed” for big American international nongovernmental organizations that had the capacity to absorb large grants — such as $500 million, she said. This made it almost impossible for others, such as African institutions, to bid. Slicing up large grants into smaller ones would help make implementation more inclusive, she added. Emmanuel Edudzie, executive director of the Ghanaian organization Youth Opportunity & Transformation in Africa, or YOTA, agreed. Devex reported last year on a dispute between his organization, which served as the sub-prime on a U.S. Bureau of International Labor Affairs grant, and the primary grant holder, CARE USA, with the CARE Ghana country office managing the project. At the heart of the dispute was a disagreement over increases in payment for his staff as the country grappled with an economic crisis. He said the U.S. foreign aid system has been rigged in favor of INGOS, leaving local organizations that carry out the work with little power and recognition. There’s been an “over-centralized structure,” in which INGOS absorb a significant portion of funding and “meagre amounts” trickle to local organizations, he said. He added that this can be inefficient, extractive, and can lead to gatekeeping, and asymmetrical terms between the sub-prime and prime grant holders. Instead, he would like to see the U.S. government directly fund local organizations — working to streamline their vetting. He said there’s also a need to standardize indirect cost recovery for local organizations. While INGOs often charge about 15% to 30% for overhead costs — the same levels of flexibility aren’t afforded local organizations, he said. There’s also a need to ensure there’s mandatory transparency for INGOs around the levels of overhead costs they maintain and the details of sub-granting arrangements, he said. “This was a very, very, very inefficient model where you've created a system to prop up the same machinery to get more grants,” Kyobutungi said. “That's a huge chunk of the money that doesn’t make it to the ground.” But this also means that as huge swaths of U.S. funding departs the continent, governments and other funders don't need to replace the exact sum USAID previously spent, Kyobutungi said. That’s because they won’t need to account for the same levels of overhead costs or funds that remained in the U.S. — grants often came with stipulations around buying American services. “You can actually get to the same outcomes, but with much less money,” she said. Edudzie said there’s also a need for transparent, independent grievance and arbitration mechanisms for local organizations to report alleged misconduct on the part of the prime contract holder — and safeguards to prevent retaliation. Local organizations receiving sub-awards have also dealt with complex compliance frameworks and aid agreements laden with legal and technical jargon that “even experienced mid-level professionals struggle to interpret,” according to Recadina Webi, the chief executive officer and founder of the Kenya-based The Dotted i, a consultancy firm for organizations looking to receive and manage funds from bilateral donors, trusts, and foundations. “This creates unnecessary barriers for both local stakeholders and implementing partners, limiting their ability to engage meaningfully,” Webi said. The U.S. foreign aid system also distorted markets in countries with high staff salaries, and expensive housing, education, and insurance, Kyobutungi, who runs an organization based in Nairobi, said. For example, African organizations often struggle to retain staff because international organizations poach them with better packages. “We are trying, but we can't keep up,” she said. Moving forward, Amne Suedi, managing director of Shikana Investment and Advisory Group, a company based in Tanzania and Switzerland, that assists private and public sector partners with their investments and operations in the Eastern and Southern African markets, emphasized that much of the money funneled towards local entities should go to the private sector — because it has operational capacity, a results-oriented mindset, and incentive to implement impactful programming. Suedi has advised development institutions on private sector development programs. And while there’s still a place for humanitarian assistance during acute crises, Webi said aid funds should increasingly be used to help facilitate trade, create markets, build up infrastructure, and help create demand for products and services. While the aid sector has long had a focus on entrepreneurship and skills training, these other areas need a more elevated role, she said. “If people have a reliable market for their goods or services, they can generate income and improve their own livelihoods — aid becomes secondary,” Webi said. Donors should also bolster the expertise of local experts and suppliers, Suedi said. They’ve often been overly reliant on foreign consultants who know “little to nothing about Africa and its challenges,” she said. Intentions ‘laid bare’ The Trump administration has articulated its commitment to delivering “America First” foreign assistance to “advance our national interests, protect our borders, and strengthen our partnerships with key allies.” It has described a framing centered on transactional relationships as opposed to altruism. This isn’t inherently novel. Most donors, to varying degrees, have tied aid to strategic, economic, or political goals, experts said. Funding, especially from the U.S., has historically been tied to political alignment, market access for American companies, and as a tool to project soft power, including American values, Suedi said. But the Trump administration has now made these intentions explicit. “What the Trump administration did was strip away the diplomatic language and make it overtly transactional,” Suedi said. “For decades, aid has benefited from the branding of being about development and solidarity, even if it was ultimately about fulfilling the donor’s priorities, sometimes more than the recipient’s.” This bluntness could be costly. The more openly transactional it becomes, aid risks losing legitimacy and trust on the ground, she said. “The feel-good sentiment that has been cultivated for decades that the recipients of aid are ‘partners in development’ will be stripped away, and the fact that recipients are just pawns in a geopolitical chessboard will be laid bare,” Suedi said. Edudzie agreed that linking aid to narrow geopolitical or commercial interests risks “commodifying development” and reduces complex human development issues to “quid-pro-quo arrangements that ignore long-term systemic change.” “Aid must remain a tool for justice, empowerment, and shared global responsibility — not simply a bargaining chip in diplomacy,” Edudzie said. But he added that if “transactional” implies performance-based funding focused on results, accountability, and equity — in exchange for funding —- that could be beneficial. Perhaps one silver lining is that the Trump administration has now removed pretenses, the African Population and Health Research Center’s Kyobutungi said. Given this, governments can act accordingly, examining what leverage they have in any given transaction. Kyobutungi added that she expects many autocratic governments will also be aligned with the Trump administration’s ideologies, which in recent months has aggressively pushed to roll back LGBTQ+ rights and efforts at achieving gender equity. “They're going to be very happy that they're not being told to not enact LGBTQ laws,” Kyobutungi said. “A lot of African autocratic governments will love this.” Checks and balances Some of the leading rhetoric the Trump administration has used around the dismantling of USAID has included allegations of corruption. Billionaire Elon Musk, who is assisting Trump in dismantling large swaths of the federal government, called it a “criminal organization.” Trump said that Musk found fraud at USAID, and said, “It has to be corrupt.” But these accusations weren’t accompanied by evidence. In Trump’s first week in office, Paul Martin, USAID’s inspector general — whose office monitored USAID programs for waste, fraud, and abuse — outlined several oversight failures, including the lack of cooperation from United Nations agencies and foreign nongovernmental organizations in investigations, as well as limited vetting of partners for ties to terrorism and corruption. Martin was fired the next month, a day after his office published a report detailing the impacts of President Donald Trump’s foreign aid freeze. Webi said that corruption exists — to some degree — in nearly every sector, and she doesn’t believe corruption in foreign aid is significantly higher than in other sectors. “Aid systems often include some of the most rigorous accountability and monitoring mechanisms,” she said. In her experiences as a fund manager in the development sector, she’s encountered instances of fraud — primarily at the sub-grantee level — but these were identified early through oversight systems. “Prompt mitigation measures were taken, including investigations, recovery of funds, and strengthening internal controls,” Webi said. “This underscores the importance of robust due diligence, capacity assessments, and ongoing monitoring — not the need to dismantle or overly restrict aid.” USAID is one of the highest maintenance funders, Kyobutungi said. “It's almost impossible to circumvent all these requirements that the U.S. government has for accounting. And I think if you do, and you get caught, then of course, you wouldn’t get funding in the future,” she said. And in discussions around corruption in foreign aid, sometimes accusations are selectively directed towards recipient governments and local actors, experts said. “What’s often missing from that conversation is that corruption is not unique to recipient countries. A lot of wastage and inefficiency happens on the donor side too — through bloated contracts to foreign consultants, expensive procurement processes that exclude local suppliers, and funds channeled through layers of intermediaries,” Suedi said. Suedi added that the presence of corruption is also often weaponized against a recipient when the donor acknowledges it exists even before funds are dispersed. Historically, the U.S. has channelled money to corrupt governments to serve geopolitical interests — including during the Cold War to counter Soviet influence. “I think there’s a lot of hypocrisy around the corruption discourse,” Suedi said.