‘I’m alive thanks to US foreign aid’

“I am alive because of USAID,” says Dmytro Sherembey.

He is been residing with HIV for twenty-four years in Ukraine, and says the company, which distributes billions of {dollars} of assist around the globe, has helped forestall the virus from spreading there.

“Each second HIV-positive individual in Ukraine was recognized because of this programme,” Mr Sherembey provides.

However the way forward for USAID (the US Company for Worldwide Growth) is now very unsure.

Considered one of US President Donald Trump’s first actions after returning to workplace was signing an government order pausing nearly all international help for 90 days whereas a evaluate might be carried out. He has mentioned USAID is run by “radical left lunatics” and is getting away with “large fraud” – with out giving proof.

Mr Sherembey, who heads 100% Life, the biggest patient-led organisation in Ukraine, remembers that when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, warehouses storing HIV medicine have been bombed.

It was USAID help that made it potential to shortly procure substitute medicine and distribute it throughout the nation, he explains.

“USAID’s slogan is that that is help from the American individuals. But it surely seems that this assist might be stopped by the choice of 1 individual,” he says.

USAID was established in 1961 by President John F Kennedy. It has round 10,000 staff and a price range of practically $40bn (£32.25bn), out of a complete of $68bn in US authorities international assist spending.

It has bases in additional than 60 international locations, and works in dozens of others. Nevertheless, many of the work on the bottom is carried out by different organisations that it contracts and funds.

The vary of actions it undertakes is huge. Its work contains offering meals in international locations the place persons are ravenous, to working the world’s gold-standard famine detection system, which makes use of knowledge evaluation to attempt to predict the place meals shortages are rising.

Elon Musk – the world’s richest man, who has been tasked by Trump with shrinking the US federal authorities – has known as the company “a prison organisation”, with out offering proof, and has mentioned it’s “time for it to die”.

However in international locations equivalent to Afghanistan, the tip of USAID might trigger large issues. The company is likely one of the greatest donors to the nation’s well being sector, funding initiatives that present life-saving companies to moms and youngsters.

A physician answerable for USAID-funded initiatives there says greater than 60 of his staff, together with midwives, nurses and docs, have been informed to remain at house after funding was paused.

“The longer term seems bleak and the impression on sufferers is very large,” he says.

“If the funding halt continues, moms might be compelled to provide start at house because the amenities are closed and it’ll enhance mortality charges,” one midwife says.

USAID’s work additionally branches out into areas like cybersecurity. One Iranian activist, specializing in anti-censorship, says their organisation operates with USAID funding.

“If an opposition determine, a college scholar, or a girls’s rights activist is arrested in Iran, it’s NGOs just like the one I work for that instantly act so the individual’s e mail and social media accounts are locked and eliminated,” says the activist, who requested anonymity as a result of worry of reprisals.

This has meant that if Iranian intelligence brokers drive detainees to disclose their passwords, they can’t entry that individual’s communications, the activist says.

“If an web firm works with the regime to limit Iranians’ entry to the web, we expose them publicly and get them… sanctioned by the EU and the US,” the activist provides.

“All of this work is now about to be stopped due to the funding freeze.”

Amongst its different actions, USAID additionally grants scholarships – with 1,077 undergraduate college students in Egypt alone receiving cash. Trump’s pause on worldwide spending and his feedback on USAID have thrown the futures of those college students into doubt.

“I really feel like I do not know my destiny. I used to be as soon as a prime scholar with a shiny future, however now my future seems to be darkish, and I worry heading within the unsuitable course,” mentioned Mohamed Ashraf, one of many affected college students.

Trump is a long-term critic of abroad spending, and has mentioned it doesn’t symbolize worth for cash for American taxpayers – singling out USAID, which he has described as wasteful. However whether or not he can really shut down the company isn’t but clear.

Closing USAID altogether, as Musk needs, would doubtless require an act of Congress – through which Trump’s Republican Social gathering holds slim majorities in each chambers.

The administration reportedly intends to merge the US authorities’s primary abroad assist company with the Division of State. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he’s now the appearing head of the company – which says hundreds of its employees around the globe might be placed on depart on the finish of the week.

For Mr Sherembey in Ukraine, the stakes could not be greater.

“My life is now in danger. If my hospital runs out of this medicine, I should seek for it elsewhere,” he says.

“However the tragedy for an HIV-positive individual in Ukraine is that you just can’t merely go to a pharmacy and purchase these medicine. You can’t purchase them on the black market. HIV-positive individuals right here don’t have any alternate options,” he provides.

“It’s barbaric that now we have returned to the Stone Age.”

Reporting by Diana Kuryshko, BBC Ukrainian; Hafizullah Maroof, BBC Afghan; Maryam Zohdi, BBC Persian; Rehab Ismail, BBC Arabic; George Wright