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    African HIV services face double blow of cuts from both Trump and UK

    Groups fighting to prevent HIV on the ground in Senegal face a double blow of aid cuts – with Britain announcing a £150m cut to their biggest donor, the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria on top of Donald Trump slashing US aid funding.Senegal has already had its ability to stop the spread of the virus hollowed out by Trump’s cuts announced at the start of the year, which have hit services reaching some of the most vulnerable groups. While aid from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) made up a quarter of funding for HIV services in Senegal, another third comes from the Global Fund. On 21 November, the Global Fund will host a summit aiming to raise $18bn (£13.3bn) for its work for the next three years. The UK has announced a pledge of £850m – a fall of 15 per cent which it is estimated could cost up to 255,000 lives.After the USAID folded following the announcement from Trump at the start of this year, around 25 sites – roughly a fifth of those in Senegal offering pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to prevent new infections – have been left scrambling. “Does it mean that some people have had to stop the PrEP? Yeah, for sure,” said Ousseynou Badio, project lead for Alliance Nationale des Communautés pour la Santé (ANCS), a Senegalese national health alliance. Ibrahim* began taking a daily medicine known as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) – which prevents potentially life-shortening HIV infection – two years ago after learning about the programme through a friend.“At the beginning, I was quite hesitant to start on it because I didn’t know what I would find there,” he said. “I was quite scared”. In order to avoid discrimination, Ibrahim was not open about his sexuality. “I would have to hide and also be very careful,” he said, so he avoided HIV testing for fear of the result and of turning the “eye of the community” on him. But with the support of the National Network of Key Populations of Senegal (RENAPOC), he did get tested, confirming his HIV negative status. He was then offered PrEP to help prevent him from becoming one of the up to 30 per cent of gay men in the country who have the virus. That is in comparison to the relatively low national infection rate of around 0.3 per cent. Since being on the medicine, “I think I’ve become more confident,” he told The Independent. Ibrahim is one of the lucky ones, his access to PrEP and support hasn’t been affected. But the US, while protecting HIV programmes more than many other areas, has scrapped almost all prevention. Based on a questionnaire of 128 health workers and 18 leaders of community organisations in the wake of Trump’s cuts, the National Council for the Fight Against AIDs (CNLS) found a decline in access to PrEP, testing and condoms as well as decline in people living with the virus sticking to their antiretroviral treatment. The true impact of the budget cuts across the country won’t be known until at least end of this year, however, the council said. Dakar, in Senegal More

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    Why is Donald Trump threatening military intervention in Nigeria?

    Donald Trump has threatened to launch a “guns-a-blazing” US military intervention in Nigeria, claiming that the west African country’s government has failed to prevent attacks on Christians.Here’s what we know so far about the unfolding situation.What did Trump claim and what was the US political context?In a post on his Truth Social account at the weekend, Trump said: “Radical Islamists are responsible for this mass slaughter” and warned that if the Nigerian government failed to stop the killings, Washington would “immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria” and could “go into that now disgraced country, guns-a-blazing”.Trump’s remarks came after weeks of lobbying by US lawmakers and conservative Christian groups urging him to designate Nigeria as a “country of particular concern” (CPC) for alleged religious persecution – a list that also includes Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and China.His statement reflected renewed domestic political pressure to appear tough on the marginalisation or persecution of Christians abroad, a theme that resonates strongly with parts of his rightwing, evangelical base.Do Christians face a particular security threat in Nigeria?Nigeria is officially secular but almost evenly divided between Muslims (53%) and Christians (45%), with the remaining population practising African traditional religions. Violence against Christians has drawn significant international attention, and is often framed as religious persecution. However, most analysts argue the situation is more complex.In parts of central Nigeria, deadly clashes between itinerant Muslim herders and predominantly Christian farming communities are rooted in competition over land and water but exacerbated by religious and ethnic differences. The herders often claim reprisals for the killing of their people and cattle, while local communities see the attacks as ethnic cleansing targeting their settlements.Priests and pastors have increasingly been kidnapped for ransom, as they are viewed as influential figures whose worshippers or organisations can mobilise funds quickly. Some analysts say this may be a trend driven more by criminal economics than religious discrimination.What is the wider security situation in Nigeria?In the north-east, Boko Haram and its splinter groups such as Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) have waged an insurgency since 2009, killing tens of thousands and displacing millions.In the north-west, heavily armed criminal gangs – often labelled “bandits” – carry out mass kidnappings and raids that affect both Muslim and Christian communities. These groups have expanded operations into north-central Nigeria, exploiting weak state presence and local grievances.“Christians are being killed, we can’t deny the fact that Muslims are [also] being killed,” Danjuma Dickson Auta, a Christian and community leader from Plateau state in the Middle Belt, told Agence France-Presse.Meanwhile, in the south-east, separatists seeking to revive the defunct state of Biafra have been linked to violence against government institutions and civilians, with most victims being Christians. In all, thousands have been killed across multiple fronts, creating overlapping humanitarian and governance crises.How has Nigeria responded to its security crises?Successive Nigerian governments have struggled to contain these threats and security forces are stretched thin across multiple fronts. They are also often accused of human rights abuses that previously halted US support – most notably under the Leahy Law, which restricts arms sales to forces accused of violations.In the absence of state police and proper intelligence collaborations at all levels of the security hierarchy, many communities remain unprotected, and vigilante groups have filled the vacuum in some states.How has Nigeria responded to Trump?In a statement on Sunday, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu did not name Trump directly but emphasised that Nigeria “is a democracy with constitutional guarantees of religious liberty”. He said characterising the country as religiously intolerant “does not reflect our national reality”.Meanwhile, his presidential spokesperson, Daniel Bwala, described Trump’s post as “a miscommunication” and expressed hope that both leaders would “iron out” their differences if they meet. He insisted that “a data-driven assessment” rather than “isolated reports and social media videos” should guide international conclusions.Bwala added that any military action “would only happen if it is a joint action with the Nigerian government”, reaffirming Nigeria’s sovereignty.Still, concerns are mounting that Trump’s remarks could affect bilateral relations, particularly aid and sales of arms, or be exploited by secessionist groups such as the Biafra Republic Government in Exile, which is already lobbying in Washington. More

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    Wole Soyinka, Nigerian Nobel laureate and Trump critic, says US visa revoked

    The Trump administration has revoked the visa for Wole Soyinka, the acclaimed Nigerian Nobel prize-winning writer who has been critical of Trump since his first presidency, Soyinka revealed on Tuesday.“I want to assure the consulate … that I’m very content with the revocation of my visa,” Soyinka, who won the 1986 Nobel prize for literature, told a news conference.Soyinka previously held permanent residency in the United States, though he destroyed his green card after Donald Trump’s first election in 2016.Soyinka speculated that his recent comments comparing Trump to the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin might have struck a nerve and contributed to the US consulate’s decision.Soyinka said earlier this year that the US consulate in Lagos had called him in for an interview to reassess his visa, which he said he would not attend.According to a letter from the consulate addressed to Soyinka, seen by Agence France-Presse, officials have cancelled his visa, citing US state department regulations that allow “a consular officer, the secretary, or a department official to whom the secretary has delegated this authority … to revoke a nonimmigrant visa at any time, in his or her discretion”.Reading the letter aloud to journalists in Lagos, Nigeria’s economic centre, he jokingly called it a “rather curious love letter from an embassy”, while telling any organisations hoping to invite him to the United States “not to waste their time”.“I have no visa. I am banned,” Soyinka said.The US embassy in Abuja, the capital, said it could not comment on individual cases, citing confidentiality rules.The Trump administration has made visa revocations a hallmark of its wider crackdown on immigration, notably targeting university students who were outspoken about Palestinian rights.Soyinka said he had recently compared Trump to Uganda’s Amin, something he said Trump “should be proud of”.“Idi Amin was a man of international stature, a statesman, so when I called Donald Trump Idi Amin, I thought I was paying him a compliment,” Soyinka said. “He’s been behaving like a dictator.”The 91-year-old playwright behind Death and the King’s Horseman has taught at and been awarded honours from top US universities including Harvard and Cornell.His latest novel, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, a satire about corruption in Nigeria, was published in 2021. Soyinka described the book as his “gift to Nigeria” in an interiview with the Guardian.In February, the Crucible theatre in Sheffield staged Death and the King’s Horseman.Soyinka left the door open to accepting an invitation to the United States should circumstances change, but added: “I wouldn’t take the initiative myself because there’s nothing I’m looking for there. Nothing.”He went on to criticise the ramped-up arrests of undocumented immigrants in the country.“This is not about me,” Soyinka said. “When we see people being picked off the street – people being hauled up and they disappear for a month … old women, children being separated. So that’s really what concerns me.”Trump’s crackdown has seen national guard troops deployed to US cities and citizens temporarily detained as part of aggressive raids, as well as the curtailing of legal means of entry. More

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    West Africans deported from US to Ghana ‘dumped without documents in Togo’

    West Africans deported by the US to Ghana are now fending for themselves in Togo after being dumped in the country without documents, according to lawyers and deportees.The latest chapter in Donald Trump’s deportation programme, their saga became public earlier this month when the Ghanaian president, John Mahama, disclosed that his country had struck a deal to accept deportees from the region.Eight to 10 west African nationals have since been forcibly sent by Ghana to Togo, bypassing a formal border crossing, and then left on the street without passports.“The situation is terrible,” said Benjamin, a Nigerian national, who said over the weekend he was staying in a hotel room with three other deportees and only one bed, living on money sent from their families in the US.Benjamin – who is using a pseudonym to protect his identity, as he fears persecution from the Nigerian government – said an immigration judge had ruled in June that he couldn’t be deported to Nigeria, citing risks to his life because of his past involvement in politics. He had expected to be released to his wife and children, who are US citizens.He said he was beaten by immigration and customs enforcement (Ice) agents when he refused to board a US military plane headed to an unspecified location, which turned out to be Ghana.Ice did not respond to a request for comment.View image in fullscreenUp to 28 people have arrived in the west African nation from the US so far in the deportation programme.Accra disclosed an initial batch of 14, and Meredyth Yoon, a US-based lawyer, said a second plane that could carry the same amount had since landed, though it was unclear how many people were on it.The initial 14 deportees had won protections in US immigration courts preventing their removal to their home countries for fear of persecution, their lawyers said.But Washington was sending them to Ghana as a loophole, Yoon said – with Accra making it clear people would be forwarded on to their home countries.One deportee, a bisexual man from the Gambia, was immediately sent home by Ghanaian authorities and is living in hiding because same-sex relations are criminalised in the socially conservative country, according to court filings.Two Togolese nationals were deported to the Togo border with Benjamin. They were crying and repeating “It’s over, it’s over”, he said, adding that they had since gone into hiding.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBenjamin and another deportee, Emmanuel – also a pseudonym – said they had spent more than two weeks under military guard in Ghana’s Dema camp, a detention facility in Bundase, 70km (43 miles) outside Accra, with nine other deportees who suffered from exposure to heat, mosquitoes and unsanitary water.The Ghanaian military eventually told them they were taking them to a hotel. Instead, they were driven to the Aflao border crossing on the outskirts of the Togolese capital, Lomé. With the cooperation of Togolese border officials, they were taken “through the back door” of the facility and left on the other side.“We are in hiding right now because we have no type of documents, ID, whatsoever,” said Emmanuel, a Liberian national who arrived in the US in the 1990s during the first Liberian civil war and was granted asylum.Emmanuel and Benjamin had been green card holders, and are married to US citizens. Both were sent to Ice detention after serving prison sentences for separate fraud charges.Emmanuel was fighting his removal in court when he was deported, Yoon said.The UN human rights office has called on Ghana to stop deporting those sent by the US “to Nigeria, the Gambia, Togo, Mali, Liberia or any other third country where there are substantial grounds for believing that they would be in danger of being subjected to torture”.The US state department said: “We will pursue all appropriate options to remove aliens who should not be in the United States.” More

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    Zohran Mamdani’s identity may seem complex but to Ugandans he is simply their ‘own son’

    Amid the trees clustered with jackfruit and the boda boda motorcycles weaving precariously around Kampala’s congested roads earlier this year was a campaign poster for Katongole Singh, an immaculately coiffed candidate who positively beamed alongside the president, Yoweri Museveni.With a Sikh Indian surname and an indigenous Ugandan first name, Singh is no rarity in the Ugandan capital, where people of Indian descent have lived for more than 125 years. Many people here boast a multi-hyphenated “African Indian” identity – as indeed does the Zohran Kwame Mamdani, the 33-year-old running for mayor of New York City.Mamdani – who made shock waves this summer when he defeated Andrew Cuomo to win the Democratic primary, setting himself up for a likely victory in the mayoral race this November – was born in Uganda, and moved to New York when he was a young boy. In July Mamdani even returned here for his marriage ceremony, a sprawling three-day affair in Kampala.The same month, the New York Times reported that an anonymous source – alleged to be Jordan Lasker, a well-known eugenicist and neo-Nazi – had hacked internal data showing that on an application to Columbia University in 2009, Mamdani had identified his race as both “Asian” and “Black or African American”.The story sparked outrage from some critics who alleged Mamdani was weaponising identity politics in order to gain preferential access to the prestigious university. (He was not accepted.)Mamdani said he had ticked what he described as “constrained” boxes to capture the “fullness of my background”, and that he did not see himself as African American or Black, but as “an American who was born in Africa”.In Kampala, however, it is clear that Ugandans of Indian descent are unquestioningly considered African – both by Black indigenous Ugandans and by themselves.View image in fullscreen“We have people from India with Ugandan indigenous names, and they speak the Ugandan language,” said Sarah Kirikumwino, a 20-year-old communications student. “They will tell you they actually do not know anything about India because they were born here.”Be that as it may, Indian cultural influence is easy to identify here, not least through food. Near Kampala’s Acacia mall, a Black Ugandan woman selling chai made the sign of the cross before dipping her vegetable samosa into an emerald green chutney.“Asian cuisine such as samosas, chapatis and chai is very well integrated into Ugandan society,” said Aman Kapur, a Kenyan restaurateur of Indian descent, who catered for Mamdani’s wedding. “They were introduced here in the early 19th century by the Asians who were brought in to work.”Mamdani’s mother, the Oscar-nominated film director Mira Nair, is Indian. His father – the post-colonial scholar Mahmood Mamdani – was born to Indian parents in India.Kapoor said Mamdani’s wedding feast was as mixed as the heritage shared between him and his American-Syrian wife, who he met on Hinge: a smorgasbord of Mediterranean, Indian, Pakistani and Ugandan cuisine, including servings of rolex – a staple Ugandan street food of chapati rolled around eggs, which shares the same name as the Swiss watch.The backlash Mamdani faced over his identity reminds Mark Niwagaba – a student at Kampala’s Makerere University – of the “birther movement” conspiracy theory, in which Donald Trump claimed Barack Obama wasn’t a natural born citizen, as the constitution requires of presidents.“Obama’s dad was of Kenyan origin and the mum was Hawaiian – he wasn’t Black enough, and he wasn’t white enough,” the 24-year-old said at an open-mic poetry night at Kardamom and Koffee, a cafe Mira Nair is said to frequent. (Obama’s mother was born in Kansas and studied at the University of Hawaii.) “Mamdani seems to face the same challenge.”The history of Indians in Uganda has not been without strife. South Asian migrants – most of them Indian – were brought into the country by British colonial powers as indentured labourers from 1894. It was Ugandan Indians who built a 600-mile railway that linked Uganda’s side of Lake Victoria to the port of Mombasa in Kenya.View image in fullscreenFavoured by the British to manage tea and coffee plantations, they quickly established successful businesses and gained affluence while Black Ugandans struggled.Then in 1972, Idi Amin expelled about 50,000 Ugandans of south Asian origin, giving them 90 days to leave.Nevertheless, despite now making up less than 1% of the population, Ugandans of Indian descent remain a thriving community here, contributing 60% of tax revenues. From signs for the billion-dollar Madhuvani group to hotels like the four-star Fairway Boutique hotel – one of Uganda’s first hotels, founded by the Jaffer family – the affluence of Ugandans of Indian descent can be seen across the capital.Many have lived their whole lives in Uganda and are accepted as African. Yashwant Patel, 71, who was born in Kampala and now lives in Birmingham, in England, recalls childhoods spent swimming in Lake Victoria, sprawled across the city of Entebbe, and eating mangoes and guavas.“Nobody looked at us like we were invading the place,” Patel recalls. “On the way to Entebbe … you could buy a whole basketful of mangoes which we would eat. I can still remember the juice! And the mango seeds were of course brought from India. Although I hadn’t been to India, my mother and father would say, ‘this is like being in India!’”Many people here consider Mamdani absolutely African. “Our own son is taking up a big position in the US, and we Ugandans are very happy with that,” said Fred Ndaula, a Ugandan tour guide in Kampala. “They are Ugandans. This is their country.”Identity in the US can be complex, however, and not everyone agrees that Mamdani has the right to claim an “African” identity. “African American” is often used to specify the people of Black African descent who were violently amputated from their history and their ancestry through the transatlantic slave trade.View image in fullscreenThe case of Rachel Dolezal – an academic and former president of a local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) – is one infamous example of a white woman who masqueraded as Black until she was exposed in 2015.“This has generated African-American resentment, and therefore not a surprise that Mamdani’s attempt to accurately reflect his complex heritage on a form designed for binary Black/white thinking would ruffle many US African-Americans,” said Dr Kim D Butler, a Black historian and associate professor at the department of Africana studies at Rutgers University.But Mamdani, she added, “is more closely connected to a specific African country than I have yet to discover for my paternal ancestors, who worked the land of a revolutionary war officer, having left a land whose name we no longer remember these 200+ years.”She added: “‘He’s not really African’ conveys a subtle message we have heard spoken about us – “We’re not really American.”Indeed, Indians from Africa do not always fit easily into US racial categories, notes Amishi Aggarwal, an Indian researcher at the University of Oxford who has been working with refugee communities in Uganda.He points to one of Nair’s films, Mississippi Masala, as a reference point. The film follows a Ugandan-Indian family forced to flee Amin’s Uganda for the US, where one of the daughters falls in love with an African American man played by Denzel Washington. The film shows the racism expressed by her family – even as they face racism, too, as immigrants in the deep south.“There’s a lot of dynamics around caste and class within the Indian-Ugandan community as well, and there can be internal racism,” says Aggarwal.Mamdani’s own history is even more complex: his family moved from Uganda to South Africa, where his father Mahmood taught at the University of Cape Town. The young Mamdani’s affinity to his African Ugandan identity could be attributed in part to the work and activism of his father, the prolific author of several books including on colonialism, the Rwandan genocide, Darfur and the so-called war on terror.Mahmood picked up that activism after moving to the US, where, inspired by Uganda’s independence movement in the 1960s, he joined the civil rights movement and was involved with the Montgomery bus boycotts. He also named his son Zohran Kwame after Ghana’s first democratic president, the icon of Pan-Africanism Kwame Nkrumah.Historian Shamil Jeppie, who worked with Mahmood at the university, first met Zohran Mamdani as a child there. As an anti-apartheid student activist, Jeppie saw not only how race was weaponised by the apartheid regime, but how centuries of migration and mixing of communities created multi-hyphenated identities and communities like his own that couldn’t be understood in the global north.“‘African’ is not a race,” said Jeppie. “Africa is a continent, a space. It’s not co-terminous with race, language or religion. It is populated by all varieties of languages, religion and ethnic groups.”He says it’s no surprise Mamdani’s identity is too complex to fit neatly into a box on a university application. “‘African’, ‘Asian’, ‘Muslim’ – for us Africans, these are not contradictions at all.” More

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    Rwanda accepts seven people from US as part of deportation deal

    Seven people have arrived in Rwanda as part of a deal to accept deportees from the US, the Rwandan government has said.“The first group of seven vetted migrants arrived in Rwanda in mid-August … Three of the individuals have expressed a desire to return to their home countries, while four wish to stay and build lives in Rwanda,” Yolande Makolo, a government spokesperson, said on Thursday.Officials offered no information on the nationalities of the seven deportees. Rwanda said on 5 August it would accept up to 250 people from the US, and that it would have “the ability to approve each individual proposed for resettlement”.The first arrivals would be “accommodated by an international organisation with visits by the International Organisation on Migration and Rwandan social services”, Makolo said.Donald Trump’s administration has been pushing a deportation drive, negotiating controversial arrangements to send people to third countries, including South Sudan and Eswatini, formerly Swaziland.Rwanda signed a lucrative deal in 2022 to accept migrants from Britain, only for the agreement to be scrapped when Labour came to power last year.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionKigali agreed to the scheme with Washington because “nearly every Rwandan family has experienced the hardships of displacement”, Makolo said earlier this month. Those who arrived in Rwanda would be provided with training, healthcare and accommodation, she added.The Trump administration has said third-country deportations are necessary because home nations sometimes refuse to accept the deportees.Rights experts have said the deportations may break international law by sending people to countries where they face the risk of torture, abduction and other abuses.Rwanda, which has a population of 14 million people, claims to be one of the most stable countries in Africa and has drawn praise for its modern infrastructure. However, the agreement with Britain drew criticism from rights groups and faced a long-running legal challenge.President Paul Kagame’s government has been accused of human rights violations and of crushing political dissent and press freedoms. More

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    ‘Debilitating consequences’ in Uganda after USAID cuts – photo essay

    In northern Uganda, the unfolding consequences of US funding cuts to international humanitarian aid are palpable. Thousands of families have been living in refugee camps along the border with South Sudan for almost a decade, and newcomers are reported every day as the never-ending conflict within the country intensifies.Uganda has long been a crossroads of migration, shaped by historical and contemporary population movements. Today, it hosts over 1.9 million refugees and asylum seekers – one of the largest refugee populations in the world. Persistent violence in South Sudan and the eruption of armed conflict in Sudan have displaced millions. As both countries spiral further into instability, Uganda remains one of the few safe havens in the region.The decision by Donald Trump’s administration to cut support to USAID, a giant in the international humanitarian assistance network, disrupted the lives of millions of people across the continent, and other humanitarian groups were impacted. In March, the World Food Programme (WFP), an international non-profit, announced a cut to food distribution to 1 million refugees in Uganda.The AVSI Foundation, along with many other humanitarian actors, was forced to abandon a project that employed more than 200 local field officers, leaving their families without a steady income, and thousands of refugees unable to enroll in agricultural training, schools, or start small businesses. Before the end of 2024, they had identified 13,000 households to receive support that vanished just a few days after Trump’s inauguration day.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenAmong a slew of executive orders, and actions by the “department of governmental efficiency” (Doge), led then by Elon Musk, the funding cuts dashed people’s hopes and expectations of leaving extreme poverty. A general sentiment of failure and retreat spread among the refugee and host communities. In the following months, a consequent rise in suicides was reported, as Jatuporn Lee, a UNHCR local representative, explained.“Families are struggling to cope with the impact of reduced support, increased food insecurity, higher land rental costs, growing mental health and psychosocial challenges, surges in gender-based violence, school drop-outs, child neglect, abandonment, and child labor,” she said. “We would be cautious about drawing a direct link between funding cuts and suicide rates. As a non-clinical specialist, drawing such a correlation can be misleading. However, these concerning vulnerability trends are clear indicators of growing vulnerability and underscore the urgent need for sustained donor support to promote refugees’ protection, welbeing, and social and economic inclusion.”View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenIn April and May, I spent two weeks in several northern Ugandan districts, including Lamwo, Kitgum, Madi-Okollo and Terego, at the very time when new refugees from South Sudan and Sudan were arriving at the border seeking safety. Olive Ngamita, the representative of AVSI Foundation in Kampala, said that 200 humanitarians in Kitgum had to leave, and that they had paid several months of rent in advance, relying on their upcoming salaries.The absence of international humanitarian support left a vacuum in the ecosystem of refugee settlements and host communities. Teachers who stop receiving their salary volunteer to maintain continuity in their students’ education, but struggle to support their families. Since the beginning of 2025, children and youth have been abandoning schools in large numbers, unable to afford the enrollment fees that were once subsidized. Small restaurants and street food vendors, who had looked forward to expanding their activities through loans and microcredit initiatives, have instead scaled back their operations.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenIn the quiet corners of these settlements, there is a visible loss of rhythm – routines once built around schooling, training sessions and market days have been disrupted. The absence of humanitarian programming leaves young people idle, exposing them to greater risks of recruitment, trafficking or exploitation.Trump and his cohorts replied to harsh criticism of the cuts from the agency’s officials and the humanitarian world, saying they would not cut life-saving aid. Massive humanitarian operations in critical situations have the primary goal of providing food and access to healthcare, indeed. But the bigger picture is to sustain a community, not to let it free fall.One of the first people I met in the Palabek camp in Lamwo was Viola, a 23-year-old pregnant woman who, unable to treat malaria and lower her fever, miscarried. Antimalarials were not delivered to the camp’s clinic. The supply chain, because of the freeze on international aid, had been interrupted. Her story is not an exception. In places where disease can spread fast, even short interruptions in supplies can be fatal.View image in fullscreenUSAID was meant to secure the United States’s dominance as part of a system aimed at stabilizing countries and strengthening diplomatic relations through cooperation. The long-term ramifications of this policy shift are only beginning to emerge. What is unfolding in Uganda today may soon reflect broader regional patterns, where donor disengagement risks creating power vacuums ripe for instability.As Nicholas Apiyo, a Ugandan lawyer and human rights defender, explains: “There is an absolute uncertainty in the future. National and international organizations that depended on USAID have either closed or scaled down their operations. People are left with no continuous care, and many have already lost their lives.“The USAID office in Kampala, is now closed, with debilitating consequences. Although funding for life-saving aid partially resumed, the disruption left a heavy toll on the beneficiaries of treatment to cure Ebola, HIV and malaria. A restoration enabling the supply chain to resume will take time, and lives will be lost in the process.”View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenUganda will have to adjust to a new funding mechanism, which, according to Apiyo, must increase its national budget for assistance. African countries could now strengthen their ties with Russia, India, Iran and China – those countries are seen as more predictable and less “schizophrenic”, as Apiyo puts it.“You need soft power to rule the world. The colonial roots of the humanitarian system have always had their negative consequences in the majority world as a way to extend its dependency on the donor.”An example of successIn the Madi-Okollo and Terego districts, located near a triple border, hundreds of refugees from the DRC and South Sudan cross into Uganda daily at unofficial border crossing points, converging to form a growing community in established refugee settlements. There, interventions that received funding before the imposition of the new policies remain operational, promoting sustainable economic practices and creating job opportunities. However, educators are concerned that without further funding, those children, out of school without job opportunities, could be driven to illegal survival strategies and be at higher risk of forced recruitment in their country of origin, contributing to internal instability. Local teachers and social workers spoke of “a race against time”, where every month of consistent support can be the difference between a child learning to read or joining an armed group.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenAVSI Foundation implemented the Step – Transition from Emergency to Sustainable Development Program, a project funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation through the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation, in collaboration with the Office of the Ugandan Prime Minister, UNHCR, local leaders and partners. It aimed at improving the socioeconomic stability of refugees and host communities by addressing their priority needs through a multisectoral approach. The project reached 600 direct participants.The project promoted the use of renewable technologies among households, increasing adoption from 0% to 61%. These included briquette production, small-scale irrigation, water harvesting, energy-saving cooking solutions, and partnerships with private renewable energy providers.View image in fullscreenBy the end of the initiative, 92% of families reported higher agricultural production. This was supported through training, access to farming tools and seeds, and the establishment of backyard gardens with a reliable water supply. The program also formed 24 production and marketing groups, bringing together refugees and host community members to improve cooperation and create income opportunities.Support systems for the most vulnerable were strengthened, offering mental health and psychosocial services, gender-based violence prevention, and legal assistance through community dialogues, legal clinics and coordinated referral pathways. Cases of abuse and neglect were promptly referred as a result of child protection and birth registration initiatives.Special focus was placed on pregnant adolescents, young women and youth, who received life skills training, mentorship and sport therapy, resulting in 80% showing positive behavior change. Positive parenting sessions also improved family relationships, with follow-up home visits and group mentoring helping communities sustain these changes. These models – holistic, inclusive, and locally adapted – should guide future international efforts. What they demonstrate is clear: when investments are sustained, results follow.View image in fullscreen More

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    What will the AI revolution mean for the global south?

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    View image in fullscreenI come from Trinidad and Tobago. As a country that was once colonized by the British, I am wary of the ways that inequalities between the global north and global south risk being perpetuated in the digital age.When we consider the lack of inclusion of the global south in discussions about artificial intelligence (AI), I think about how this translates to an eventual lack of economic leverage and geopolitical engagement in this technology that has captivated academics within the industrialised country I reside, the United States.As a scientist, I experienced an early rite of passage into the world of Silicon Valley, the land of techno-utopianism, and the promise of AI as a net positive for all. But, as an academic attending my first academic AI conference in 2019, I began to notice inconsistencies in the audience to whom the promise of AI was directed. AI researchers can often identify consistent choices for locations where such conferences are hosted, and where they are not. NeurIPS, one of the top AI conferences, has highlighted annual issues for obtaining visas for academic attendees and citizens from the African continent. Attending such a prestigious conference in the field grants one the opportunity to gain access to peers in the field, new collaborations and feedback on one’s work.I often hear the word “democratisation” within the AI community, an implication of equity in access, opportunity and merit for contribution regardless of one’s country of origin. Associate professor of economics Fadhel Kaboub talks about how “a lack of vision for oneself results in being a part of someone else’s vision”, reflecting on how systematically lacking an access to infrastructure results in local trade deficits in economies.As in the time of Nafta’s promise of “free trade”, promises of “AI democratisation” today still exist and benefit mainly countries with access to tech hubs not located in the global south. While the United States and other industrialized countries dominate in access to computational power and research activity, much of the low-paid manual labour involved in labelling data and the global underclass in artificial intelligence still exists in the global south.Much like coffee, cocoa, bauxite and sugar cane are produced in the global south, exported cheaply and sold at a premium in more industrialized countries, over the past few years we have seen influence in AI inextricably tied to energy consumption. Countries that can afford to consume more energy have more leverage in reinforcing power to shape the future direction of AI and what is considered valuable within the AI academic community.In 2019, Mary L Gray and Siddharth Suri published Ghost Work, which exposed the invisible labour of technology today, and at the beginning of my tenure at graduate school, the heavily cited paper Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence was published. It has been five years since these seminal works. What would an AI community inspired by the Brics organisation, which united major emerging economies to advocate for themselves in a system dominated by western countries, look like for the global south?I often ask myself how AI has contributed to our legacy, and whose stories it won’t tell. Has AI mitigated issues of mistrust and corruption in less-resourced countries? Has it benefited our civic communities or narrowed educational gaps between less-resourced regions? How will it make society better, and whose society will it make better? Who will be included in that future?A historical mistrust can impede adoption by developing countries. Furthermore, many developing countries have weak institutional infrastructures, poor or nonexistent laws and regulatory frameworks for data projection and cybersecurity. Therefore, even with an improved information infrastructure, they are likely to function at a disadvantage in the global information marketplace.A currency is only as good as its perceived global trust. When thinking about the democratization in AI and a vision of what it could be in years to come, AI’s survival requires including more perspectives from regions such as the global south. Countries from the global south should work together to build their own markets and have a model of sovereignty for their data and data labour.Economic models often consider a definition of development that includes a measure of improvement in the quality of life of the most marginalized of its people. It is my hope that in the future that will extend to our evaluation of AI.

    Krystal Maughan is a PhD student at the University of Vermont studying differential privacy and machine learning More