This time for Africa: With USAID slashed, India and Japan must step in to support development
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. It is most welcome that external affairs minister S Jaishankar has said that India and Japan are well-positioned to support Africa’s sustainable development, even as the US government has frozen the funds its aid agency, USAID, used to disburse, including for anti-retroviral drugs that prevent patients infected by the HIV virus from developing full-blown AIDS, demining operations and immunisation.
It is vital that African aid recipients do not find themselves stranded, without time to recalibrate their dependence on the Overseas Development Assistance of the rich world. It is also vital that those who step forward to throw them a lifeline are not donors who cynically leverage the aid they give to secure geopolitical allegiance.
China has been actively scouting support from countries for the reunification of Taiwan without the precondition that the process be peaceful. Foreign aid figures prominently among the casualties of the United States’ policy shift, under President Donald Trump, to an ‘America First’ philosophy.
It is not just the freeze, and possible curtailment, of funds disbursed from USAID that is at stake. Also on the chopping block are chunks of the aid budgets of rich, European nations as they struggle to satisfy Trump’s demand that all members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization increase their defence spending, not just to meet the NATO target of 2% of GDP, but to compensate for past funding deficits.
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