Following the announcement by the United Kingdom that it will cut its foreign aid to Third World countries, fresh fears have arisen over what this means for social programmes in Kenya. The new round of foreign aid cuts has come after suggestions from the United States that European countries need to de-prioritise foreign aid and development, and focus instead on bolstering support towards the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and other local defence programmes.
In response the UK has done exactly that and moved money that was meant for education, health and gender programmes directly into its defence budget.
This shift reflects a geopolitical realignment of purpose. Foreign aid, from the beginning, has always been political in nature, being utilised by the West as a means of exercising soft power in Africa, Asia and South America. In exchange for funding of social programmes, the West can continue to monitor activities in these regions, and utilise these same programmes to influence politics, supporting leaders that it considers key to its own interests.
Now, with the conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine escalating, the West needs its money to bolster its influence in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Russia has been a threat to western supremacy since the end of the 19th century. The Cold War was the period when foreign aid started to be used to exercise soft power to ensure that poorer nations aligned themselves with capitalism and denounced communism.
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NATO, too, exists to solidify the reach of the western influence across Europe, working tirelessly to take from Russia any influence it may have. Ukraine is one of the final frontiers of this ideological war, and a win for Russia would deal a huge blow to the West.
HIV transmission
Back home, the consequences of losing out on foreign aid have been dire, and will continue to get worse as more aid is lost. The US cut all its funding to social programmes in January this year when Donald Trump came into power. The most notable was the funding cuts on USAID, an organisation that was solely responsible for funding thousands of programmes in healthcare in the Third World. President Donald Trump also abolished the famous President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief programme, essentially cutting all efforts to reduce HIV transmission.
How are Third World governments responding to these losses, after decades of allowing their social programmes to be run by the West? A brief look at the situation in Kenya shows that not much is being done to provide relief to bereft populations. Rather than counter the loss of money that went towards health and education, they are cutting back even more of what the people need. It has officially been announced, for instance, that free primary education will no longer be offered.
And yet, even under these circumstances, there is never a loss of conversations around pay increases for government officials, or heightened allowances for travel and accommodation, all expenses that are both unnecessary and wasteful.
Now would be the time for African governments to come together and figure out how to sustainably resource their own social programmes. That so much is left to the West to handle is worrying. Again, as the USAID withdrew its programmes, it nearly took away with it a trove of information that it had gathered from Third World nations through the Demographic and Health Surveys that it regularly conducted.
If not for the benevolence of the Internet Archive, crucial healthcare information could have been lost entirely. Such a situation should never be allowed to happen again. African countries must take control of their own futures, rather than continue to watch as lives are lost as they await the next handout to come their way.
Ms Gitahi is an international lawyerÂ
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By Njahira Gitahi