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The Africa Confidential Blog
Western aid cuts may trigger new wave of protest in weak states
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The abrupt end of development aid from the United States leaves governments across Africa facing funding shortfalls, particularly for healthcare. Washington spent US$8 billion in aid to Africa last year, most of which will be lost if the three-month freeze continues beyond April. Countries in the EU are also cutting back, while Japan and China say that they will not plug the funding gap.
Some leaders, like former Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, have said that the end of USAID and thousands of expatriate jobs in the aid industry offers an opportunity for governments to end their aid dependency. That is true in theory. Yet it will mean higher taxes if health and education services are to continue as before. In Kenya, mass protests against a Finance Bill with new taxes to raise several billion dollars led to the storming of parliament last June. Many governments will be nervous of testing how much more their citizens can pay.
The alternative is deep cuts to healthcare, agriculture and education, the main budget lines funded by foreign aid. In South Africa and Kenya, health ministry officials have warned that hundreds of thousands of lives could be lost by 2030 if patients are unable to pay for anti-retroviral medicine. In Kenya, in a bid to account for lost US funding, the health authority has reclassified HIV/AIDS drugs so that they will no longer be subsidised.