About The Independent
The Independent is among the UK’s leading national news brands. It is independent of ties to political parties and operates along guiding principles of integrity, inclusion, innovation and making positive change happen.
This submission draws on evidence from Rethinking Global Aid, a new project to investigate the impact of foreign aid spending cuts on Africa and other parts of the developing world. We are reporting on the repercussions for global health and the climate crisis, and interrogating what the future holds. The project receives funding from the Gates Foundation. All of the journalism is editorially independent.
Summary
As the UK prepares to cut its overseas development aid contributions to 0.3 per cent of GNI, the international development minister has claimed that there is, “an absolute crisis in public support for international aid”. However, the nature, role and impact of aid is rarely accurately communicated to the UK public.
The Independent has a dedicated team specifically reporting on and documenting the impact of aid and cuts on global health; cross-border disease risks; the climate crisis and security - areas the government has named as among its priorities.
Our reporting has consistently evidenced what happens when you cut aid to effective programmes, by gathering human stories, generating and analysing data and investigating aid cut impacts.
The Independent is calling on the government to draw on this full spectrum of evidence to ensure that, before a lack of British public support for aid is used to argue for cuts, the public is in full possession of the facts about the true impact of overseas development aid spending and the consequences of cutting it.
● How should the government be communicating the results of UK aid, and its importance, to the public? And what does the best evidence suggest about how the government should be prioritising UK Official Development Assistance in the coming years?
The Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) has named the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria as being among its priorities for spending - but cuts of £150m have nevertheless been announced. MPs from across parliament, including with direct experience of aid work and of seeing the fund in operation, have told The Independent how effective it is. Every £100m the UK cuts from its previous £1bn contribution has been estimated to cost 170,000 lives.
A report published in the Lancet warned of millions more people getting sick if donor funding including from the UK and the US were to fall away. Reporting by The Independent has demonstrated that these concerns are already becoming a reality. Even with life-saving work supposedly protected, people with HIV have already died in Uganda, Zimbabwe and Senegal as a direct result of US cuts.
Back in March, The Independent had already met children orphaned because their parents had lost access to treatment and met pregnant women unable to halt transmission to their unborn children. Several of the HIV positive patients The Independent filmed at that time have since died because of a lack of antiretrovirals. In October in Senegal, The Independent spoke to the loved ones of three disabled people with HIV who died at a single community centre after losing the transport they needed to pick up their drugs.
Clubs, support and discussion groups which have now been axed because of cuts were a major draw to the centre in Dakar. They may not be seen as life-saving in themselves, but without them the centre has seen a reduction in people coming through the doors to receive vital prevention advice and access to the preventative drug PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis), condoms and referral for treatment.
In Uganda, while life-saving drugs have been protected, cuts to specialised services supporting key populations have led to LGBT+ people losing access to the drugs regardless.
Even relatively small cuts such as those seen in Senegal, to theoretically non-life-saving services, have led to deaths - an outcome which seems to be in opposition to the FCDO’s own priorities. The department has said it remains “firmly committed to tackling global health challenges” including working to end Aids-related deaths and prevent new HIV infections. In October, foreign secretary Yvette Cooper said, “no one should die of a preventable disease because of where they live.” Yet this is exactly what is happening as a result of global aid cuts.
Links
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/trump-aid-cuts-hiv-aids-deaths-b2759143.html
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/trump-aid-cuts-lgbt-africa-hiv-uganda-b2743850.html
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/trump-usaid-hiv-aids-africa-b2759141.html
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/trump-aid-cuts-hiv-africa-deaths-b2858974.html
The 2025 Spending Review revealed plans to de-prioritise the Family Planning 2030 programme.
The Independent has met young women whose lives had been saved by access to contraceptives, as well as learning the stories of those who had lost their lives because of a lack of access.
We have also reported on 16 countries running out of crucial contraception as a result of US cuts - which have created a vacuum the UK should consider contributing to filling. In Kenya, The Independent discovered, these shortages have led to a rise in calls to a helpline relating to unsafe abortion.
The Independent has reported that, according to UK director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Monica Ferro, family planning is one of the highest yielding development investments available; cheaply saving lives, boosting economies and improving women’s participation in society.
“For each dollar invested in voluntary, rights-based family planning, you can yield returns of as much as $26 in economic benefits,” she said.
By allowing girls to stay in school and women to enter the workforce it contributes to economic growth, boosts GDP and reduces a country’s long-term reliance on aid with something as simple as a $1 condom or $10 implant.
The government must accurately communicate this impact and recognise that cutting contributions to family planning is short-sighted and more costly in the long-run.
The government has said it will de-prioritise funding specifically for women and girls while suggesting its aims can still be achieved by ‘mainstreaming’ this funding - however it is unclear how this will be achievable in the context of services like sexual and reproductive health. Additionally, these types of services, as well as those supporting people living with HIV, also often provide support for people experiencing gender-based violence and cannot be easily separated. Cuts to gender-based services can lead to unintentional cuts to access to HIV and reproductive healthcare - and vice versa.
The FCDO is also deprioritising a key maternal health programme. There is a negative correlation between maternal mortality and a country’s GDP. Cuts which drive up maternal mortality can weaken countries’ resilience and ability to move towards becoming self-sufficient. Our reporting reveals that US cuts are risking progress on maternal mortality in Rwanda and Ethiopia. Without the US-funded clinic in Rwanda, women could face long journeys for emergency care once again, and newborn deaths could return to previous levels – almost 30 times higher than once the clinic opened. Even with the funding largely protected until November, staff have been lost and care has been scaled down.
Ethiopia is a major success story when it comes to reducing maternal mortality. But The Independent has learned that dramatic US cuts are risking sending this progress into reverse, already significantly affecting accessibility of services including family planning and maternal health services.The UK’s aid spending plan published in July revealed funding cuts to Ethiopia of 25 per cent coming for the next year, adding to the risk of skyrocketing maternal mortality if these areas are not protected.
Links:
Infectious diseases do not respect borders and the FCDO has named pandemic preparedness as a priority. Nevertheless it has made cuts to work on health systems strengthening and health emergency response including in DRC. Our reporting has evidenced how the weakening of the global health security system via aid cuts is already having an impact.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), amid an Ebola outbreak, water and sanitation programmes essential for stopping the spread of disease, as well as stockpiles of drugs and personal protective equipment have been hit by US cuts. In Sierra Leone during a recent Mpox outbreak, Trump’s aid cuts left the country scrambling to plug gaps in programmes, likely hampering the speed of its response. The head of Africa CDC told The Independent that aid cuts had compromised the response to recent disease outbreaks. If the government sees pandemic preparedness and global health security as priorities, it should communicate what role it plans to play in filling these gaps.
In Senegal, The Independent discovered that the FCDO is investing next year in the Institut Pasteur, a leading lab for the wider region improving disease surveillance, outbreak response and local resilience. For now, the institute still relies on grants but it is using funding to make moves to become financially self-sufficient - as well as making the continent more self-sufficient when it comes to disease management - by increasing its manufacturing of vaccines and diagnostics. It serves as a positive story of how aid can drive self-sufficiency not dependency. However these examples are rarely communicated by the government to the public.
Links:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/trump-aid-cut-ebola-africa-b2831378.html
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/mpox-africa-hiv-aid-cuts-trump-b2819386.html
Conclusion
Our on-the-ground reporting has uncovered deaths and other severe consequences linked to global aid cuts that would otherwise have been unlikely to come to light. As the UK’s aid cuts hit a wide range of programmes, these impacts will multiply and it will become increasingly difficult to measure the true toll. This is made more challenging by the fact the government is still to publish a full breakdown of the programmes already affected. Without the ability to fully monitor these consequences, it will also be harder for the government to understand what ‘good’ programmes are and fairly assess value for money. The Independent is calling on the government to commit to properly measuring the impact of its cuts and to operating with the maximum level of transparency, including publishing details of all programmes that are in line to be cut for 2025/26, 2026/27, and for the subsequent years of the Parliament once those decisions have been made.