More than 14 million of the world’s most vulnerable people, with a third of them bieng small children, could die by 2030 because of Trump administration’s dismantling of US foreign aid, research projected yesterday.
The study in the prestigious Lancet journal was published as world and business leaders gather for a United Nations conference in Spain this week, with the hope of bolstering the reeling aid sector.
The US Agency for International Development, USAID, had provided over 40 per cent of global humanitarian funding until Donald Trump returned to the White House in January when it was slashed radically two weeks later.
The funding cuts “risk abruptly halting and, even reversing two decades of progress in health among vulnerable populations,” warned study co-author Davide Rasella, a researcher at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal).
“For many low and middle income countries, the resulting shock would be comparable in scale to a global pandemic or a major armed conflict,” he said in a statement.
Looking back over data from 133 nations, the international team of researchers estimated that USAID funding had prevented 91.8 million deaths in developing countries between 2001 and 2021.
That is more than the estimated number of deaths during World War II, history’s deadliest conflict.
The researchers also used modelling to project how funding being slashed by 83 per cent, the figure announced by the US government earlier this year, could affect death rates.
The cuts could lead to more than 14 million avoidable deaths by 2030, the projections found.
That number included over 4.5 million children under the age of five or around 700,000 child deaths a year.
For comparison, around 10 million soldiers are estimated to have been killed during World War I.
Programmes supported by USAID were linked to a 15-per cent decrease in deaths from all causes, the researchers determined.
For children under five, the drop in deaths was twice as steep, at 32 per cent.
USAID funding was found to be particularly effective at staving off preventable deaths from disease.
The study found that there were 65 per cent fewer deaths from HIV/AIDS in countries receiving a high level of support, compared to those with little or no USAID funding.
Deaths from malaria and neglected tropical diseases were similarly cut in half.
Study co-author, Francisco Saute, of Mozambique’s Manhica Health Research Centre, said he had seen on the ground how USAID helped fight diseases such as HIV, malaria and tuberculosis. “Cutting this funding now not only puts lives at risk but also undermines critical infrastructure that has taken decades to build,” he stressed.
A recently updated tracker run by disease modeller, Brooke Nichols, at Boston University estimated that nearly 108,000 adults and more than 224,000 children had already died as a result of the US aid cuts.
That works out to 88 deaths every hour, according to the tracker.
After USAID was gutted, several other major donors, including France, Germany and the UK, followed in announcing plans to slash their foreign aid budgets.
These aid reductions, particularly in the European Union, could lead to “even more additional deaths in the coming years,” study co-author, Caterina Monti, of ISGlobal said.
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The researchers emphasised that the grim projections were based on the current amount of pledged aid, which could rapidly come down if the situation changed.
Dozens of world leaders are meeting in the Spanish city of Seville this week for the biggest aid conference in a decade but the United States will not attend.
“Now is the time to scale up, not scale back,” Rasella said.
Before its funding was slashed, USAID represented 0.3 per cent of all US federal spending.
“US citizens contribute about 17 cents per day to USAID, around $64 per year. I think most people would support continued USAID funding if they knew just how effective such a small contribution can be to saving millions of lives,” co-author, James Macinko, of the University of California, Los Angeles, said.
