When one door closes, you would hope that another opens. As USAID was formally shut down on Monday, a once-in-a-decade development financing conference was kicking off in Seville. But while initially intended to move the world closer to its ambitious 2030 sustainable development goals, it now looks more like an attempt to prevent a reversal of the progress already made.
A study published in the Lancet predicted that Donald Trump’s aid cuts could claim more than 14 million lives by 2030, a third of them among children. For many poor countries, the scale of the shock would be similar to that of a major war, the authors found. More than four-fifths of the US agency’s programmes have been cut, with surviving projects folded into the state department.
