Stopping health funding in Africa weakens America

Following President Donald Trump’s decision to suspend foreign aid, President Cyril Ramaphosa can display great leadership by meeting with leaders of wealthy countries and convincing them to increase spending to support the health systems of poorer countries. Photo of Ramaphosa: Ashraf Hendricks. Photo of Trump: Daniel Torok (via Wikipedia)

President Donald Trump’s administration took a cruel decision this past week to freeze US foreign aid for health, potentially leaving millions of people in many African countries without their life-saving antiretroviral treatment.

On Wednesday morning, Trump’s secretary of state Marco Rubio backtracked on part of that decision. But if it is not reversed permanently we can expect advances in life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa of the past two decades to start coming undone. We can also expect HIV infection rates to start picking up again, as people with HIV start getting viral rebound and become more infectious.

The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) was started by the Republican administration led by George W. Bush in 2003. The complexity of world politics is such that the president who perhaps did more than anyone else to unravel confidence in global rules and norms – by invading Iraq – also championed a programme that has saved many millions of lives. Bush described PEPFAR as “compassionate conservatism”.

PEPFAR had bipartisan support. It is one of the greatest contributions the US has made to the world. It is now under threat by people claiming with straight faces – who came to power while the US economy is booming – to make America great again.

About $5-billion went into PEPFAR last year. Although it’s a huge amount of money it’s a tiny fraction of the US budget. It’s not straightforward to measure how many lives PEPFAR has saved but it is in the millions. This is a lot of bang for the buck.

The US government is also the largest contributor to the other major funder of global health: the Global Fund. Its future is also bleak.

Already in South Africa, vital services for extremely vulnerable clients had to pause, such as those provided by the Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Institute clinics in Johannesburg. Hopefully with Rubio’s announcement these can now resume but the situation remains chaotic and the future of this and other US-funded health programmes across Africa is fraught with uncertainty.

Opportunities

America’s abandonment of foreign aid for health relinquishes soft power. There is an opportunity here for the European Union, Canada, Australia, Japan and China to step into the breach and increase their contributions to the Global Fund, or even to directly plug holes left by PEPFAR using bilateral aid – though such funding may come too late for some.

This would not merely be an act of charity. In the post-World War II world, what has made countries great, powerful, prestigious and influential is not nastiness and murder, but investing in projects of solidarity that make the world a better place. US wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq degraded US power. Its arming of Israel, especially during the war on Gaza, has shown US concern for universal human rights to be hypocritical and worsened its global standing. By contrast PEPFAR unequivocally enhanced its superpower status.

President Cyril Ramaphosa can display great leadership by meeting with leaders of wealthy countries and convincing them to increase spending to support the health systems of poorer countries.

But perhaps the biggest opportunity is for African countries themselves. Many remain far too dependent on foreign aid to run their health systems. A country like South Africa should be able to pay for every last cent of its health systems. Corruption and mismanagement have had an inordinate role in making this difficult.

For countries like Malawi, Mozambique and others, there is a long way to go before they can pay their own way for HIV treatment. But pressure, from within and out these countries, must be put on their governments to build robust economies capable of delivering tax revenue to spend more on health.

In a very divided world where illiberal nationalist populism is on the rise and African governments are for the most part still weak and corrupt, these opportunities seem unlikely to be seized. But we hope we are proven wrong.

Geffen is the editor of GroundUp. Low is the editor of Spotlight. Both served in the Treatment Action Campaign which successfully campaigned for HIV medicines in South Africa, as well as other countries.

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