Zainab Usman
Every decade or so, the global aid industry finds that it must transform to survive. During these periods of change, donor countries restructure their aid agencies, shrink or expand their assistance budgets, and lobby for the creation or dissolution of a UN initiative or two. Typically, once the aid industry conforms to the whims of donor countries, the crisis is averted and business continues as usual. Since U.S. President Donald Trump began his second term, the aid industry has found itself at another inflection point. The Trump administration has gutted USAID, the world’s largest development agency, ending 86 percent of its programs, shuttering its headquarters, and terminating nearly all its 10,000 employees. At the same time, the Trump administration has slashed funding for various multilateral initiatives on climate, global health, and education.
Today’s crisis, however, is different from those that came before: this could truly be the end of foreign aid as we know it. For decades, global development—that is, the attempt to improve and save lives of the poor—has been driven mostly by foreign assistance provided by wealthy governments. Some scholars and analysts deride this process as the “aid-industrial complex.” But even advocates of foreign aid have come to see it as an industry, including in their efforts to reform it, which approach its defects as matters of business inefficiency. And now that governments in many rich countries have sharply lurched to the right and taken more skeptical stances on aid, this industry is collapsing. As a result, many charity workers, researchers, and academics will be out of jobs. More important, millions of poor people around the world will suffer.
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