Will Chalk

President Donald Trump.

This is the Global News Podcast.

The United States is going to wind down health assistance to Zimbabwe after negotiations over funding collapsed.

The US embassy in Zimbabwe said Washington had offered $367 million over five years to support Zimbabwe's priority health programmes.

They include HIV treatment and prevention as well as tuberculosis and malaria.

But the Zimbabwean authorities rejected it, saying Washington was demanding too much sensitive health data in return.

In effect, they said, they were being asked to provide the raw materials for scientific discovery without assurance they'd be able to access the products that came from it.

Rashida Ferrand is a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

She's lived in Zimbabwe for the past 20 years and her research focuses on HIV in children and young adults.

She thinks the impact will be severe.

So why exactly did the government in Harare pull out of the deal?

Our correspondent there is Shingai Nyoka.

Zimbabwe essentially is saying that the US's demands are an unequal exchange, that they're lopsided, that Zimbabwe is being asked to share sensitive data that

in terms of its biological resources, biological samples related to disease control over an extended period of time without any real guarantee that Zimbabwe would benefit from any kind of research in terms of vaccines and treatments.

And the concern that they expressed was that these samples would be used in the U.S.

for research and have potentially commercial value for the U.S., but then there's no guarantee that if in future there is some kind of an epidemic that Zimbabwe or any African country would be able to have access to.

to the results of that research.

Zimbabwe has made significant progress over the last 20 or so years, largely due to the assistance that it's received from the US.

They are effectively supplying medication to about 1.2 million people.

They've spent about $2 billion in the health sector over the last 20 years.