What's next for USAID funded projects?

Summary

Business Daily (BBC World Service)

Episode: What's next for USAID funded projects?

Date: November 20, 2025
Host: Sam Fenwick

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Brief Overview

This episode explores the impact of the abrupt US government decision to slash and ultimately shut down its USAID aid programs, leaving hundreds of development and humanitarian projects around the globe in jeopardy. Through firsthand stories from Rwanda and Nepal, and interviews with affected NGOs and strategists, the episode examines the scramble for funding, emergency stop-gap measures from both mystery philanthropists and former USAID staff, and a looming uncertainty over the future of global aid as traditional funding sources recede.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Human Impact: Stories from Rwanda

• Marciana's Story (02:32–05:18)

  • Marciana, from Rwanda's Nyagatare district, describes how USAID-backed charity Village Enterprise enabled her to transition from moving house-to-house in poverty to running a profitable goat-rearing business.
  • She highlights the role of training and community support in building her confidence to start a business, countering gender norms:
    • “In the past, men would oppress us, saying that women shouldn't do business and earn money. But when Village Enterprise came and explained how people trade and make a profit, I thought, I too can do business and earn money.” — Marciana [04:38]

• Beata's Story (05:18–06:18)

  • Another local, Beata, leveraged the program’s grants and mentoring to launch a soap-making business, now training other young people.
  • She stresses the ripple effects for the broader community and national development:
    • “If I work alone and develop myself while other young people around me are not developing, then it doesn't really help me or benefit the country…by making soap, we generate money, and each person in the group contributes. That money supports our families, and even the taxes we will pay will contribute to national development.” — Beata [06:18]

2. The Political Context: Why Was USAID Shut Down?

• US Policy Shift (07:06–10:03)

  • Sam Fenwick explains that the Trump administration—returning to office—issued an executive order suspending all USAID projects, resulting in 83% of contracts being canceled within weeks, and the agency’s formal shutdown by July 2025.

• Republican Rationale

  • Matthew Bartlett (Republican strategist, former State Department appointee):
    • Argues the Republican Party has long been skeptical of foreign aid, doubting its efficacy and criticizing creation of dependency:
      • “There’s always been a skepticism around foreign aid in the Republican Party in terms of efficacy and rationale of creating a culture of dependency… and as a global response to Covid, potentially an overreach…a very progressive administration that wanted to promote very progressive, even somewhat controversial ide[to]...incorporate them and advocate and push them internationally through USAID.” — Matthew Bartlett [08:17]
    • Differentiates between Trump and Biden admin approaches:
      • “We had the taxpayer front in mind and we had different priorities. And then when you had Joe Biden, they completely drastically changed that.” — Matthew Bartlett [09:33]

3. Emergency Response: How Some Projects Survived

• Project Resource Optimisation (PRO) (12:05–13:09)

  • A small group of ex-USAID staff form PRO, reviewing a massive database of 20,000+ projects to assess which were most cost-effective and impactful.
  • Using algorithmic analysis and direct NGO engagement, they narrow this to 79 projects, which are then publicized for potential donors.
  • “We started with a large public database…began collecting and collating and critically analyzing the most cost-effective projects…to figure out…where…you would need to put that first dollar to save the most lives.” — Rob Rosenbaum [12:05]

• Philanthropic Lifeline

  • Initial donations, including a $6 million gift from a retired New York lawyer, help fund 37 of the 79 top-priority projects.

    • Donor’s perspective:
      • “This is an emergency. This is a crisis. So until the crisis goes away, people will step up because we are in a crisis. I do not believe this is the way of the future because the funds will run dry.” — Anonymous donor [13:41]

  • A major anonymous donor later provides $65 million, covering the rest for 12 months:

    • “They wanted to do more than anticipated and they decided to fund all of the remaining projects…to keep them operational for the next 12 months.” — Sasha Gallant, PRO [15:28]

4. Long-Term Uncertainty & Governmental Strain

• Case Study: Nepal (15:52–17:57)
  • Helen Keller International’s malnutrition program in rural Nepal, previously USAID-supported, gets a temporary reprieve via PRO—but faces a daunting funding cliff.
    • “The PRO funding really helped to bridge the gap between the most essential services and the families.” — Pooja Pandray, Helen Keller International Country Director [17:08]
    • The Nepalese government is under strain after losing both direct and government-to-government US assistance, complicating procurement of essential drugs and health services:
      • “And overnight all these systems sort of crashed and the government…now has a really tough time to prioritize.” — Pooja Pandray [17:20]

5. The Bigger Picture: Shrinking Global Aid

• Global aid cuts are not limited to the US—other donor countries are also reducing their contributions.
• Philanthropy, no matter how generous, cannot fully replace large-scale governmental funding.
• As upcoming global health funding meetings loom in Johannesburg, the urgency of finding new solutions is highlighted.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the impact of aid cuts:

  • “Every single one of them is facing a fiscal cliff…each one of these organizations…is making critical decisions of which teams they can keep on the ground and which projects they’ll actually be able to deliver.” — Sasha Gallant, PRO [18:26]

• On civil society resilience:

  • “We saw some projects that had to end well before.” — Sasha Gallant [18:54]

• On the limits of philanthropy:

  • “Philanthropy can't completely fill the gap, the question is, what will?” — Sam Fenwick [18:54]

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Important Timestamps by Segment

• 02:32–06:18: Personal stories of Marciana and Beata in Rwanda, showing direct community impact of aid & entrepreneurial empowerment.
• 07:06–10:03: Political analysis with Matthew Bartlett on reasons for USAID shutdown.
• 12:05–13:09: Formation of Project Resource Optimisation and their triage of projects for emergency funding.
• 13:41–15:30: Accounts from donors; the "mystery donor" steps in to fund the rest of the projects.
• 15:52–17:57: On-the-ground view from Nepal; difficulties in health project continuity post-foreign aid.
• 18:26–18:54: Long-term challenges as aid organizations face uncertain futures.

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Tone & Language

• The episode balances empathetic reportage from the field with brisk political and financial analysis.
• Interviewees’ voices are preserved in their own words, sharing both the practical and emotional stakes.
• Host Sam Fenwick's interviewing remains measured, inquisitive, and clear, providing context for global audiences.

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Conclusion

In the wake of the US retreat from foreign aid, life-saving projects are on borrowed time, surviving thanks to fleeting philanthropic interventions and improvised rescue by professionals. The future of such programs—and the communities they serve—is deeply uncertain, as both governments and charities worldwide scramble to reimagine the system for an era of dwindling public support.

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Note: The episode is the first of a two-part series on the future of global aid, with further exploration promised in the following installment.

Transcript

[Sam Fenwick]

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[Sam Fenwick]

When you give to a nonprofit, how do you measure success? Many focus on low overhead, but what about real impact on people's lives? For 18 years, GiveWell has researched the highest impact giving opportunities. Over 150,000 donors have confidently used GiveWell, saving 300,000 lives and improving millions more. Make a tax deductible [e-mail] first time donors can have their donation matched to up to $100 while funds last. Select podcast and more or less at checkout. Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. I'm Sam Fenwick. Today we catch up with some of the projects affected when the United States cut its multi million dollar aid budget earlier this year and ask what the future holds for them. In eastern Rwanda, the sound of soap being mixed in a bucket marks the start of a small business. One helping a woman support not only her family, but her local community too. And in a clinic in southern Nepal, a mother watches anxiously as her toddler is checked for malnutrition.

[Pooja Pandray]

When we received the stop Work order, it was really truly hard breaking, you know, because came as a shock.

[Sam Fenwick]

In the first of our two part series about the future of global aid, we'll hear how a handful of projects were helped by a mystery donor.

[Sasha Gallant]

They said they wanted to do more than anticipated. They would all receive enough funding to keep them operational for the next 12 months. In total, that covered about $65 million.

[Sam Fenwick]

And how governments are trying other ways to fill the funding gap. The future of global aid as the US Pulls back All coming up on today's Business Daily.

[Marciana]

Over there there's a kitchen where I cook. That hen even has chicks. It has four chicks. It has four chicks because of the eggs. I wanted it to hatch.

[Sam Fenwick]

This is Marciana and she's showing us around her small compound in Rwanda's Nyagatare district. It's about two and a half hours drive north of the capital Kigali. She's built a thriving business buying goats, rearing them and selling them on for A profit. She says she dreams of expanding further into selling rabbits and pigs. But life hasn't always been easy for Marciana. She used to struggle getting regular work and finding enough money to pay for rent and food and her children's school fees. On many occasions, she says, she would only eat once a day.

[Marciana]

When I first started coming here, I came almost like someone who had run away. I had separated from my husband. When I arrived here, life became difficult for me. You know, I was alone. Things were hard. I rented a house, but after some time, I couldn't afford to pay for it. The next morning, they removed me from the house. Then I left and went somewhere else, rented another house, moved in, and again I couldn't afford to pay. Things kept being difficult, even my children suffering because of the situation. I kept moving from one house to another. My relatives helped me pay rent. They helped me rent a house. They kept paying for me.

[Sam Fenwick]

But then, about two years ago, Marciana came across a charity called Village Enterprise. It works with some of the poorest communities in rural Africa, helping people set up small businesses so that they can break out of extreme poverty. In Rwanda, it gives groups of three people $180 to get their businesses off the ground. It also offers them training and mentoring. To join the program, you have to be living on roughly $2 a day. And the idea is to give people just enough support to help them start a small, sustainable business.

[Beata]

It's.

[Marciana]

We used it to buy goats, and we made profit with that profit. We even managed other things. We've tripped a lot. We even rent land to cultivate. The money I earned helped me buy materials and build my house. It really opened my mind. I didn't know anything before. In the past, men would oppress us, saying that women shouldn't do business and earn money. But when Village Enterprise came and explained how people trade and make a profit, I thought, I too can do business and earn money. Before I was afra. That's exactly what I want. And I continue moving forward like that.

[Beata]

Here we are making liquid soap. You add water and you see the soap is starting to form a rare.

[Sam Fenwick]

Just around the corner from Marciana lives Beata. With the charity support, she's been able to set up her own small business making soap and body cream.

[Beata]

We stir until the soap we added has completely dissolved. That's when we add the other ingredients and start stirring. We leave it so that the foam stirs before we pour it into the moulds. We wait 24 hours after making it before putting it into the moulds. When it's done, we take it to the market and sell it.

[Sam Fenwick]

Beate is using what she's learned to train young people in her community, helping them build their own livelihoods and boosting the local economy in the process.

[Beata]

I realized that if I work alone and develop myself while other young people around me are not developing, then it doesn't really help me or benefit the country. That's when I had the idea to gather young people like me. I brought them together and told them about the SOAP project I'm doing. They wrecked it and they wanted us to work together. When I look at the project I'm doing, I see a good future for me and my family because it will continue to improve our lives. You see, by making soap, we generate money, and each person in the group contributes. That money supports our families, and even the taxes we will pay will contribute to national development.

[Sam Fenwick]

The project, run by Village Enterprise, a charity based in San Francisco, had been funded by the US government Agency for International Development, or USAID. In November 2023, it was awarded six and a half million dollars to spend over four years. By the start of this year, it had received about half of that money and says it had helped more than 5,000 business startups in Rwanda. But then this happened. So we're going to sign executive orders. First, I'll revoke nearly 80 destructive and radical executive actions of the previous administration. On 20 January, immediately after US President Donald Trump took office, he issued an executive order suspending every USAID project. Within weeks, 83% of USAID contracts had been canceled and by July, the agency had been formally shut down. Matthew Bartlett is a Republican strategist and was President Trump's appointee to the State department for the U.S. global HIV AIDS program, known as PEPFAR. During his first term, he told me why U.S. aid budgets have been cut.

[Matthew Bartlett]

There's always been a skepticism around foreign aid in the Republican Party in terms of efficacy and rationale of creating a culture of dependency to even more dire the notion of taking money, money away from poor people in the US and giving it to wealthy elites and other governments around the world. I think you then had coming off of the Biden years, which you saw an explosion of money of millions and billions of dollars across the board, domestically, internationally as well, and as a global response to Covid, potentially an overreach as well as a very progressive administration that wanted to promote very progressive, even somewhat controversial ide to somehow incorporate them and advocate and push them internationally through usaid. And that's what led to Elon Musk, who eventually fed USAID into the wood chipper one weekend.

[Sam Fenwick]

There have been some serious accusations at USAID and and the way that it's wasted money. But Donald Trump had an administration for four years before this. Why didn't he start any reforms then?

[Matthew Bartlett]

Two answers there. One is yes. Well, I was a part of that administration. We ran it properly. We certainly had different policies, we had different programming, we had different parameters, we had the taxpayer front in mind and we had different priorities. And then when you had Joe Biden, they completely drastically changed that, and those were not the case. So things did change. And from a Republican standpoint, they needed to be changed yet again.

[Sam Fenwick]

Matthew Bartlett, Republican strategist and President Trump's appointee to the State Department during his first term. This is Business Daily from the BBC World Service.

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[Rob Rosenbaum]

We started with a large public database that included information on nearly every USAID award and began collecting and collating and critically analyzing the most cost effective projects on that list to figure out in sort of like a rank order, what are the places that you would need to put that first dollar to save the most lives.

[Sam Fenwick]

How many projects did you then have to look at?

[Rob Rosenbaum]

Sure. The initial database had over 20,000 different projects totaling over $35 billion of assistance. And so we started with an algorithmic approach that brought it down to about 600 projects. We started actively engaging with the NGOs to get enough information for them that we could do our own assessment.

[Sam Fenwick]

The timing of that must have been crucial.

[Rob Rosenbaum]

It was.

[Sam Fenwick]

Because those organizations that you were contacting were winding down.

[Rob Rosenbaum]

Yeah, they were. And that was the real urgency.

[Sam Fenwick]

And how long did it take you then to get that list of 600 down to a list that you could actually do something with?

[Rob Rosenbaum]

The first month was really just heads down all 24 hours a day, building the infrastructure to enable this to happen.

[Sam Fenwick]

They eventually narrowed IT down to 79 projects and published the list on their website. Over the past few months, donors have stepped in to keep them going, including this retired lawyer from the New York area. She doesn't want to be named. I remembered that I had what's called a donor advised fund that I had set up many years ago and promptly forgot about. And it just had been ticking along and had produced, when I went to see it, a surprisingly large sum of money.

[Marciana]

How much?

[Sam Fenwick]

Well, there was a nice chunk of change. There might have been $6 million sitting there. Six million. Six million, yeah. And so you chose two projects. One was a project in Ethiopia helping farming families who have lost crops through drought and conflict. And the other one was in Nigeria, which was helping malnutrition and children. Yes. What does it tell the Trump administration, though, that people like you have donated in this way? I mean, does it sort of, in a way, prove Donald Trump right that U.S. taxpayers money didn't need to be spent in this way because there are people that will come along and pay for it. Well, this is an emergency. This is a crisis. So until the crisis goes away, people will step up because we are in a crisis. I do not believe this is the way of the future because the funds will run dry. The list put together by PRO initially raised $50 million and funded 37 of the 79 projects. Village Enterprise, who we heard from earlier, was one of the charities to receive money. And then out of the blue came a message, one that Sasha Gallant from the PRO team picked up.

[Sasha Gallant]

This actually started with an email in our inbox from an interested Donor kind of asking for a call to learn more about the process. So when we spoke to the representative there, it was clear that this donor in particular was interested in doing something quite big. We didn't expect it to be this big. The next time we heard back from that donor, they said they wanted to do more than anticipated and they decided to fund all of the remaining projects on our vetted list at that point to ensure that they would all receive enough funding to keep them operational for the next 12 months.

[Sam Fenwick]

And how much was that then?

[Sasha Gallant]

In total, that covered about $65 million. We don't know who they are, but I would say that in many ways their anonymity kind of speaks volumes about their integrity. Right. They don't want this story to be about them, but instead to actually be about kind of the incredibly important work that each of these projects has been doing to improve the lives of people around the world.

[Sam Fenwick]

In Nepal's Kopil Vastu district, in a village on the border with India, a health worker is assessing a toddler for malnutrition. It's a project supported by Helen Keller International, a global health charity. You can see in the video filmed for us by the charity that the child has been brought to the clinic by their mum. She's dressed in a bright purple and yellow sari, but she looks nervous as the health worker gently wraps a measuring tape around her child's upper arm.

[Pooja Pandray]

It's a malnutrition rehabilitation center where the travel to the health center can be from 20 minutes to an average of like an hour walk or if you're in the mountain, like sometimes couple of hours.

[Sam Fenwick]

Pooja Pandray is the country director for Helen Keller International. Its project in Nepal focuses on preventing malnutrition among children in some of the country's most hard to reach areas. It had been funded by usaid, but that support ended when the department shut down after several difficult months of wondering how they were going to keep going. They managed to get temporary funding through the pro, but Pooja says that won't last forever.

[Pooja Pandray]

The PRO funding really helped to bridge the gap between the most essential services and the families.

[Sam Fenwick]

So you've got a year's worth of funding?

[Pooja Pandray]

Yes.

[Sam Fenwick]

Are you thinking about what happens after that?

[Pooja Pandray]

The funding climate is really difficult. We are advocating to the government to really prioritize life saving interventions. The government is quite overwhelmed because USAID didn't just give money for projects like us, but also did a lot of government to government support. And overnight all these systems sort of crashed and the government is now with their own budget, they have to now procure these essential sort of drugs. And the government now is having a really tough time to prioritize. Yeah. So they're in a really difficult spot.

[Sam Fenwick]

It's hard to find out exactly how many USAID funded projects have been shut down permanently because some organisations have managed to keep going by scaling back their activities. Others have secured their own private funding. And a handful, as we've been hearing about today, have received temporary support from the pro, the small team of former USAID staff led by Sasha Gallant. But she says these projects are still at risk of closing.

[Sasha Gallant]

We're in this unprecedented moment, right, where these organizations and these programs are. Every single one of them is facing a fiscal cliff. Right. The question is when it will arrive. And so each one of these organizations who's implementing in place is making critical decisions of which teams they can keep on the ground and which projects they'll actually be able to deliver. And some of those, that cliff came really fast. Right. And we saw some projects that had to end well before.

[Sam Fenwick]

Sasha Gallant from pro. It's not just the United States cutting its aid budget. Foreign aid from across all major donor countries is shrinking as other priorities take over. And while everyone agrees philanthropy can't completely fill the gap, the question is, what will? As global leaders meet in Johannesburg to decide whether to commit billions needed to fund life saving hiv, tuberculosis, tuberculosis and malaria treatment, the question is becoming more urgent. And it's something we'll be looking at in tomorrow's edition of Business Daily here on the BBC World Service. This edition of Business Daily was produced and presented by me, Sam Fenwick. Thank you for listening.

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Who drives the world forward? The one with the answers or the one asking the right questions? At Aramco, we start every day by asking, how can innovation help deliver reliable energy to the world? How can technology help develop new materials to reshape cities? How can collaboration help us overcome the biggest challenges? To get to the answer, we first need to ask the right question. Search Aramco Powered by How Aramco is an energy and chemicals company with oil and gas production as its primary business.