Ed Butler

Hei kaikille, minä olen Ed Butler. Tervetuloa Business Dailyin BBC World Serviceen, joka käsittelee monenlaista rahaa ja työtä. Tänään käsittelemme erilaisia näkökulmia, jotka ovat kiinnostaneet kehittäjät, ja todennäköisesti monia ihmisiä Afrikassa, viimeisen vuoden tai enemmän. Mitä se tarkoittaa, että maa on pahannut noin 8 miljardia dollaria USA-tiedotuksen käytännössä? Yhdysvaltio ei ole maailmanlaajuisuus.

What impact have those USAID cuts had on the world's poorest continent? Hundreds of thousands of lives were going to be lost in a matter of months. The effect of USAID cuts. That's our double take here on Business Daily on the BBC.

A quick reminder. When Donald Trump re-entered the White House in January last year, one of his earliest executive orders was to cut most USAID funding to Africa and other poorer parts of the world. In a Truth Social post at the time, he called the levels of aid totally unexplainable. Close it down, he cried.

More than 80% of reviewed grants were terminated, affecting about 20% of all aid reaching the African continent. And since then, many aid experts have warned of dire consequences. Dr. Atul Gawande is a public health expert, a Biden White House appointee, who helped to run USAID. He believes that the cuts brought about the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives already.

Dr. Atul Gawande. Well, more on all of these arguments shortly, but let's get first to my guests today. Joining me from Lagos in Nigeria is Amy Jadasimi. She is the CEO of LADOL, a special economic zone around the port in that city. She's also part of the UN Global Compact on the Sustainable Development Goals. Amy, you have feet in both camps, right? Development and business.

Myös Dar Es Salaamista on puheenjohtaja Dr. Peter Bujari. Hän on yksityiskohtainen yliopistossa, joka on työskennellyt projekteja puolustamista HIV-vaikutuksista ja TB-vaikutuksista Tansaniassa ja Eestis-Afrikassa. Hei, Dr. Bujari. USAID-vaikutukset ovat olleet tärkeämpiä sinun työtäsi viime vuosina. Kyllä. Tansaniassa olemme saaneet noin 450 miljoonia dollaria ajan.

Okei, well we're going to hear more about those effects from you in just a moment. For me, what we're discussing today has long been a source of fascination. A lot of my work has focused on this. It really gets to the heart of what aid money does, of course, and how Africa often works. I've visited many parts of the continent many times over the last 20 years, and I have seen what aid money can do. Hi.

Can I come in? So that was me, just a couple of months ago, stepping in the door of a new maternity clinic in Sierra Leone in West Africa. Who's it? We have no name for him yet. No name yet. Very, very handsome.

And that's me meeting the clinic's latest arrival, a beautiful two-day-old baby boy. This facility, which is in a village in a remote hilltop area in the east of the country, has only recently been built, and its staff receive their wages thanks exclusively to international donor money. The midwife, Judith Sia Lamine, says that the clinic demonstrates the dramatic difference that aid money can make in one of Africa's poorer countries.

Right. So there's a difference between emergency aid and sort of development aid. That's basically what you're saying. Dr. Bujari, I mean, you've worked in the prevention of HIV AIDS. That's only happening, right, as a result of the input, the finance of many major global aid programs. You were saying this already, USAID was a big part. Describe in detail what you have seen since those aid cuts came in last year.

who are supporting to understand why they are taking medication, but also supporting their parents to better help the children. Just to be clear, Dr. Gawande said earlier, didn't he, that he thought hundreds of thousands of lives will be lost in the first year. Would you say specifically that you think lives have been lost as a result of these cuts to your program?

Ok, well listen, I think that the abrupt question is a good one and I want to come back to that in a second. The biggest donor of course and the biggest cuts by far have come from the US. That's not to say there hasn't also been an erosion of European aid budgets in recent years from the UK, Germany.

This is Matthew Bartlett. He was appointed to the State Department by President Trump during the first presidential term of Mr. Trump. He told us why he thought the president had been so open to closing down the agency last year.

That's Elon Musk, of course, who led the cuts program, the Department of Government Efficiency, last year. So former USA coordinator Matthew Bartlett there, he, despite his connections with the Trump White House, says he thought that the speed and severity of the cuts had been too fast. Amy Jadisimi, what's your take on this, the ripping off the band-aid, so to speak?

My name is Ed Butler and today we're looking at the true cost to Africa of last year's massive cuts to US and other aid spending. Many billions of dollars were summarily axed from Africa's various economies overnight. I'm with Dr. Amy Jadasimi in Nigeria and Dr. Peter Bujari in Tanzania looking at this.

Let's talk about the impact of these cuts across the continent as a whole. A recent study published in the Lancet Medical Journal projected that the global aid cuts could lead to at least 9.4 million additional deaths by 2030. It says about 2.5 million of those deaths are likely to be children under the age of five. I mean, this is pretty bleak stuff, Amy. I appreciate that your argument is...

Amy Jadisimi, sinä olet periaatteessa arvioinut, että aidemani on tehty, että se on tehty, että aidemani on tehty, että aidemani on tehty, että

Okei, Peter, let's just go to the broad big picture now. Whatever we think of these aid cuts, we are simply, are we not at a point where they have become inevitable. We have had decades and decades, tens of billions and billions of dollars pumped into Africa. It has not seen the growth levels in Africa that were perhaps forecast by the people giving that aid in previous decades.

No US or European administration right now is going to reverse them, it would seem. I mean, the politics of high income nations suggests that this money is not going to be coming back at the levels that we saw before. Africa is one way or another just going to have to adjust, isn't it?

Amy Jadasimi, me puhuttiin Lancet-rapportista yksi tavalla tai toisella. Puhutaan mahdollisesti hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of lives lost in the short term. Are you basically saying that may just be a price that has to be paid for a transition that you think is inevitable and necessary?