Many USAID-funded clinics have been closed in Nigeria and other African nations as a result of recent funding cuts announced by US President Donald Trump.
Adamu Ibrahim, a laid-off nurse, and other laid-off employees told AFP that clinics in Nigeria’s conflict-affected Borno state that used to serve 300 people a day have suddenly closed after President Donald Trump withdrew US funding.
“The clinics have been closed and (there are) no more free drugs or mosquito nets,” said Ibrahim.
Health care systems throughout Africa are being dismantled by the abrupt dissolution of USAID, the nation’s primary foreign development agency. These systems were constructed from a complex network of national health ministries, the private sector, nonprofit organizations, and foreign aid.
Malaria cases will peak around the end of the rainy season, and threatened US cuts to global vaccine funding are expected to be felt later in the year. As a result, the damage and deaths caused by the cuts are unlikely to stop anytime soon.
In Nigeria, malnutrition clinics have closed along with their laid-off employees.
Drugs in Mali run the risk of becoming stuck in warehouses due to shaky supply chains. Children are dying while walking miles to receive cholera treatment in South Sudan, and there is a shortage of medication in Kenyan refugee camps.
“People with resources will be able to go and get drugs… but the poorest of the poor, out in remote areas of Nigeria and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, they’re the ones who will be cut off,” said Lawrence Barat, a former senior technical advisor for the US President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI).
“They’re the ones whose children will die.”
Saschveen Singh, an infectious disease specialist with Doctors Without Borders in France, said the forecasts created by health ministries throughout the continent to prepare for the rainy season have serious flaws.
Seasonal malaria chemoprevention medications for young children won’t have any trouble entering Mali, but Singh told AFP that American funding was essential to organizing their distribution.
In nine provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, PMI, which was funded by USAID, served as the main supplier of malaria medications and tests to government health facilities.
“Suddenly, they’ll just not have drugs, and it’s going to be very difficult for other actors to step in,” said Singh, adding her co-workers are “scrambling” to map out where gaps may arise.
A cholera outbreak in South Sudan has forced the closure of clinics supported by USAID. According to a report earlier this month by the British charity Save the Children, children in the eastern state of Jonglei are walking hours to the nearest treatment facility, and at least five of them have died en route.
When it was announced in March that rations would be reduced and that doctors were running out of medication, protests erupted in the Kakuma refugee camp in neighboring Kenya, which is home to over 300,000.
“All the clinics around, you can get paracetamol. But all other drugs, no,” one camp elder, who asked to remain anonymous, told AFP during a recent visit.
At Kinkole General Hospital, in Kinshasa, doctors were recently treating 23 mpox patients isolated in tents free of charge thanks to American support. But workers have no idea if that funding will continue, despite an outbreak that has infected 16,000 and killed 1,600.
“We’re thinking a disaster is coming,” said Yvonne Walo, an epidemiologist at the centre.
