2 weeks Ago By Jessie Tu
Several thousand women and girls are likely to die from complications during pregnancy and childbirth as a result of US President Donald Trump’s order to freeze foreign aid for 90 days, Institute has revealed. Over 900,000 women and girls will be denied care after just a week of the freeze, according to the Institute, with that number reaching four million in a month. “Over the course of the full 90-day review period, 11.
7 million women and girls will be denied this essential care,” a report from the Institute explained. “When people are not able to access contraceptive care, they are put at risk of unintended pregnancy.” “If 11.
7 million women and girls are denied access to contraceptive care in 2025, 4.2 million will experience unintended pregnancies, and 8,340 will die from complications during pregnancy and childbirth.” The Institute has called on the Trump administration to end its harmful and unlawful withholding of funds appropriated by Congress, as they are “essential to protecting the rights, dignity and lives of women and girls around the world.
” Across the world, scores of vulnerable people are already suffering after President Donald Trump’s decision to to USAid, with dozens of organisations reporting children being left without food and life-saving medications not being delivered. Earlier this week, Elon Musk USAid as an agency that is ‘beyond repair’ and said he was working to shut it down. The critical service is currently blocked by the Trump administration’s stop-work order on all foreign assistance, putting millions of lives at risk.
Shutting down the US government’s pre-eminent international aid agency could lead to escalating disease and famine in war-torn countries, as well as cause havoc among areas including women’s rights, family planning and girls’ education. As a direct result of the withholding of funding, hundreds of thousands of women will be denied reproductive care across the world. In parts of Africa, a spokesperson for a leading international aid organisation revealed that people are already being impacted by the shut down of USAid, which is the world’s largest single donor.
“Partners on the ground [are saying] that in DRC and Sudan, medical supplies are stuck in warehouses,” the spokesperson the , adding that hundreds of thousands of children who depend of school meals delivered by the aid have gone without after the meals were left to rot. Another humanitarian offical reported payments being frozen on projects, and widespread misinformation being spread. In Uganda, one organisation working to boost community awareness around malaria have been fearing that delays in administering malaria treatment caused by the freeze will endanger the lives of thousands of children.
“The preparation for [the rainy season, when malaria risk spikes] has stopped,” the executive director of Impact Santé Afrique Olivia Ngou . “If we miss just one week or one month, we are going to lose a lot of children.” Organisations including Ngou’s are scratching their heads over Marco Rubio’s allowing for “core life-saving medicine, medical services, food, shelter and subsistence assistance, as well as supplies and reasonable administrative costs necessary to deliver such assistance.
” What constitutes as “life-saving medicine”? Nowhere in the official documents is this term clarified. In Malawi, which has recently from post-election violence in Mozambique, experts offering the community HIV testing services will be forced to close. In Johannesburg, organisations such as LGBTQ+ clinic Out, which has relied on funding from the US HIV/Aids response programme (PEPFAR) for more than two decades have had to close its doors.
Concerns are also mounting for the future of the Witwatersrand’s HIV project, which . The clinic provides critical services to sex workers in South Africa, a nation with one of the in the world. According to , more the 7.
7 million people in the country are living with HIV. In Nepal, a girls’ education initiative working to stop child marriage and trafficking has been forced to stop operations. The country has in South Asia, with 37 per cent of women being married by the age of 18 and 10 per cent married before 15.
In Bangladesh, a large organisation that coordinates ground-breaking research into Diarrhoeal Disease has laid off over 1,000 employees. , which received part of the USAid’s US$550 million assistance package in 2023, said it was forced to terminate the employees following the US administration’s announcement to suspend funding for foreign programmes. In Afghanistan, where women’s rights have been curtailed to the point of “ ”, the Taliban’s deputy minister of economy said up to 50 national and international aid organisations have been suspended or compromised across the country.
The International Council of Voluntary Agencies that the country of over 42 million “faces severe repercussions as the funding pause disrupts education programmes, healthcare delivery, and women’s empowerment initiatives, undermining long-term recovery and stability.” “This aid freeze, and potential longer-term cuts to critically needed programmes, risks eroding strategic partnerships and undermining the soft power that has long been a cornerstone of U.S.
global aid. Such actions could weaken the United States’ influence and credibility, contributing to a more unstable and fragmented world.” According to UN officials, the almost .
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