Consider This from NPR
Reporting on China's move to provide global aid as U.S. pulls out
04 Apr 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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This past year, NPR global health and development correspondent Fatma Tanis has been digging into the global impact of billions of dollars of U.S. aid being cut from programs around the world. A lot of the headlines in the U.S. focused on Washington, the chaos, the ideology, the politics. 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.
I really got the sense of how the U.S. is just viewed as this major superpower. I remember one community elder who kept referring to Donald Trump as Father Trump when he was talking about the aid cuts.
Fatma was struck by the description.
And I asked him, why are you calling him Father? And he said, well, he's the provider.
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.
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Chapter 2: What are the implications of the U.S. cutting foreign aid?
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.
In Uganda, you still see the remnants of of USAID everywhere you go. Posters and murals with, you know, the American flag, guidelines about how to deal with like the COVID-19 pandemic. You kind of see that, see that everywhere on the ground. And then on the other hand, in the big cities like The shopping malls are Chinese-built. The roads that you're taking to go everywhere are Chinese-built.
The GPS in the cars that people are driving are Chinese GPS. And people are definitely sort of aware of what's coming from where. And, you know, the Chinese... strategy of aid has long been focused on infrastructure, these big, big infrastructure projects. But they have also run into some issues with that, issues of quality.
When we were driving on those roads, there were a lot of places where they had been pretty messed up and nobody was fixing it. So at one point, that road was beautiful and paved. But now when you're driving on it, it's like potholes everywhere. But China is changing its approach.
And that's something that I've been looking into because of these, a lot of the criticism around the way that it does its aid has been hampering its reputation. And so they've been taking an approach that's slightly more similar to what the US had been doing, which is to fund these small projects here and there to win
hearts and minds they actually call them small and beautiful projects which you know go from any like there are various different you know building a bridge in an island or refurbishing maternal ward in Zimbabwe helping You know, medical supplies get into a Latin American country.
And so at a moment when the US is moving away from its model of aid and moving more toward a bilateral version, you see China moving the other way. And that's something that's really interesting to watch.
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. But that is an interesting change for a superpower like China.
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