THE girl lives in one of Cape Town’s poorest and most dangerous shantytowns. She is HIV positive, and had stopped going to school — until she was rescued by a support worker from a charity funded by the United States, and supplied with antiretroviral drugs and encouraged back into school.
Now, all that has changed. On Channel 4 News this week, we saw a support worker visiting her to disclose that funding for their anti-HIV programme had been severed, literally overnight. This was to be the last visit. “I will miss you,” the now unemployed support worker said. “I will miss you,” said the girl. “I love you.”
AIDS was the number-one killer in South Africa until George W. Bush, in 2003, introduced his President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) programme. To date, PEPFAR has saved almost 26 million lives. Nearly five million babies have been rescued from mother-to-child HIV transmission. AIDS has dropped to seventh in the table of deadly diseases, but experts fear that it will swiftly return to the top.
All this is but one result of the freezing of the $44-billion budget of the world’s biggest aid agency, USAID, by Elon Musk — a man who pockets more every year than do the world’s poorest 692 million people put together. USAID has been “fed into the woodchucker” after the Trump regime declared it “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists”. An odd way, Mr Musk, to describe President Bush.
Shamefully, a British Prime Minister has chosen to follow the Trump lead by eviscerating Britain’s aid budget (News, Comment, 28 February). It has been almost halved since 2020, thanks to Rishi Sunak, and now Sir Keir Starmer. Taking an axe to our help to the poor smacks more of a propitiatory sacrifice on the altar of Trump than a thought-through strategy to increase spending on defence.
Yet it is clear that the old arguments in favour of aid are not cutting much ice today. Yes, aid is far more effective than cynics maintain. It is a far smaller percentage of our national budget than populist tabloids imply. As a tool of soft power, it is immensely cost-effective in maintaining Britain’s status in the world. Creating jobs for unemployed youths in Africa stops them from becoming terrorists or people-traffickers, or getting on small boats across the Channel. Withdrawing aid creates a vacuum into which China and Russia will readily step with a new quasi-colonialism. They certainly won’t train judges in Iraq or provide menstrual pads for schoolgirls in Malawi.
Aid has changed over the decades. After the Second World War, it was about rebuilding Europe and Japan. During the Cold War, it was about bolstering spheres of influence. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, it became about poverty alleviation. But, in our times of fiscal stress, slow growth, far-Right populism, and new defence imperatives, it may be shifting again to something more transactional. It is not just the US and the UK that have slashed aid: so have Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.
In such a world, it is more important than ever that the Churches should sound the clarion call to remind us that aid is, most nobly, an expression of moral principle, social justice, and human compassion.
