Why some African nations are turning down Trump aid money
After dismantling the main U.S. body for foreign assistance last year, the Trump administration is again offering hundreds of millions of dollars to African countries to support their healthcare structures and help fight disease. The new deals come with conditions and face resistance from some governments.
When Kenya’s President William Ruto signed a $2.5 billion agreement with Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington last December, the deal promised a joint investment of $1.6 billion from the U.S. and $850 million from Kenya over five years. The agreement sought to build durable systems that would be ultimately self‑reliant. However, the pact was delayed by activists who went to court, and cabinet ministers only approved it last month.
The U.S. strategy shifts from the standard donor‑NGO framework to direct agreements with national leaderships, aiming to reduce dependency and overhead. Yet critics see a new form of leverage: data sharing, pharmaceutical preferences and linkage to mineral contracts. In Zambia, Foreign Minister Mulambo Haimbe criticised the package, arguing that it bundled health funding with an agreement that gave Washington “access to critical minerals.” He urged separate negotiations on each issue.
Other countries – notably Ghana, Zimbabwe and Zambia – have declined to sign MOUs. Ghana’s Data Protection Commission cited a lack of reciprocal data protection and the loss of sovereignty if data crossed borders. Zimbabwe refused on the grounds that it had no guarantee that drugs or vaccines developed from shared pathogens would be made available to its people, noting that the World Health Organization already offers a data‑sharing system.
The U.S. maintains that data sharing is essential for scientific progress and that aggregated, de‑identified information has been used for decades in combating infectious disease. Nevertheless, the new context treats data as a transactional lever, tied to commercial and geopolitical interests. Africa’s historic commitment to increased health spending since 2001 appears to be under debate in the face of a new paradigm that demands more domestic investment and data confidentiality.
Health implications have been felt acutely. The Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the first African nations to engage the U.S. health deals, accepted a partnership just as an Ebola outbreak began. US assistance cuts, particularly from the USAID, weakened frontline response, forcing staff reductions and stock shortages. Experts warn that bilateral arrangements “ignore collective challenges” and fail to provide the coordinated capacity the virus requires.
Despite the patchy uptake of bilateral MOUs – Tanzania signing recently while others remain hesitant – the U.S. policy promotes a strategy of “conditional engagement, parallel institutions, and results‑driven partnerships” rather than a deference to global organizations that struggled with crisis response. The success of this experiment remains to be seen.
