USAID and Sierra Leone - Why not everyone is mourning the end of USAID : Shared by Viviane Sakkal

They take the money and go: why not everyone is mourning the end of USAID

Mara Kardas-Nelson

The Guardian
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Summary
This article explores how the dramatic cuts and de-facto dismantling of United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under the Donald Trump administration is resonating globally.

While aid watchers feared chaos, on the ground in places like Sierra Leone many show less panic and more resigned acceptance. The author draws on long-term local perspectives—especially one Sierra Leonean, David Kpakiwa—to explain why the end of USAID as it was known isn’t being mourned everywhere: decades of disjointed programmes, dependency creation, and foreign flurries of funding have left locals skeptical that anything will change. The piece questions how abrupt aid withdrawals can be reform when they simply replicate past failures.

Quotes
"Mustapha Kabba, the deputy chief medical officer at Sierra Leone’s ministry of health and sanitation, told me that he couldn’t be too worried about the cuts because he didn’t actually know how much money the US government gave to Sierra Leone: the funding was so byzantine, funnelled through so many different NGOs, each with their own budget and timeline and priorities, that he didn’t have a comprehensive picture of what would be affected and therefore which gaps he’d have to fill."

“If you’re dependent too much, you’re not going to be happy. We’re still very much in-dependence.”
“Whether the Trump administration is truly interested in learning from past failures is another matter.”