Rob Schmitz

So Fatma went to Uganda last September to find out what it looked like on the ground.

What she found was something unexpected, not anger, but something harder to explain.

Fatma was struck by the description.

Father Trump.

That phrase, equal parts reverence and bewilderment, captures something about how U.S.

foreign aid has functioned for decades.

Not just as money, but as identity, as presence, as power.

Consider this.

The United States spent decades building influence abroad through foreign aid.

Now that it's pulling back, other powers are lining up to fill the void.

From NPR, I'm Rob Schmitz.

It's Consider This from NPR.

The U.S.

spent decades and billions of dollars building global influence, funding clinics, coaching programs, disease prevention.

Now that that money is gone, NPR global health and development correspondent Fatma Tanis went to Uganda to see what's left and who the new players are that are moving in.

Yeah, that's interesting because I used to cover China, and back when I was covering China, China would focus its aid on, like you said, infrastructure like roads, public transportation, and especially ports.

And a lot of it was built partly to help that country but also to take resources from that country and then quickly export them to China.

So it was in many ways self-serving.

What you're saying right now is that there are actually –

Shifting to other types of aid basically to help that country develop in its health care and also for education, things like that.