UNITED States President Donald Trump's executive order suspending foreign aid is a disaster that has negatively impacted all efforts to achieve the overall objective of solidarity and foreign aid assistance, the Welt Hunger Hilfe (WHH), a Germany-aligned aid organisation, has said.
Germany is a founding member of the European Union (EU) and has been since 1958, along with five other countries, fighting for “Zero Hunger by 2030” across the world.
The European economic giant has also provided funding amounting to €5,07 billion for more than 12 128 overseas projects in about 72 countries.
Trump issued the order to review the funding policy’s alignment with the US interests while a waiver on life-saving projects, including health projects, was issued a few weeks later. In an interview with NewsDay on the sidelines of the Right to Food inception meeting in Harare early this week, WHH country director Matthias Spaeth said the executive order was bound to spell disaster for many countries and populations.
“I think the executive order made by the Trump administration is a disaster. It is not only that certain organisations or certain people are directly impacted, I think almost everybody is affected,” he said.
“The whole sector is suffering. For me, the worst thing is not only the financial aspect. We are destroying solidarity between human being to human being.
“You will see that this nationalism will gain weight. That people are somehow keeping their resources. There are a lot of challenges we cannot master alone but many things they can do and it’s always done on the back of the poorest of the poor, so it is a disaster.”
He, however, said it was now time for Africa and all affected populations to mobilise their own resources.
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“I think there is a lot of common sense out there and these meetings have to bring us together in order to increase our efforts to compensate what others are no more doing,” Spaeth said.
“It is a little bit early to really analyse the actual impact of these decisions and maybe they will also be taken back to a certain extent but to me, the mindset behind is the dangerous thing so we have to increase and strengthen our voice in order to bring back that solidarity.”
Meanwhile, Community Technology Development Organisation director Andrew Mushita has said the ban presented Africa with a platform to develop home-grown solutions.
“In recent times, we have seen more dynamic shifts that have been happening with CSOs [civic society organisations] and NGOs [non-governmental organisations] failing to meet their mandates over freezing of the US aid or whatever but this is largely through the geopolitical developments in the world,” he said.
“When you look at the war in Ukraine, it is also having a huge impact and negative effect to development assistance or development aid, particularly in the global south.
“The new administration in the US, is having a pause at the moment with regard to development assistance but we hope that with the effects coming on the ground, I think as a continent, we need also to come up with our own innovative measures so that we have some kind of home-grown solutions to some of our challenges,” Mushita said, adding that the solutions would be mixed with contributions from development assistance to mitigate disasters.
“I think there are a number of policy measures which are being developed by our governments, by the African Union also,” he said.
