By Kate Lapides-Black | Director of Communications
As we write our June update, we have much to celebrate. A key day secondary school we've been working to start for several years has finally begun construction. Our Team Angaza interns distributed over 1,000 reusable pads and SRHR education to girls last year. They also identified and enrolled a record number of 1,092 out-of-school students in 2024, a figure we totaled in March for our 2024 Annual Report, which you can view through this link. Those same Team Angaza recently underwent trainings in community health to learn about significant local maternal health challenges including anemia, gestational diabetes, and hypertension/preeclampsia; fistula; and waterborne diseases and sanitation. They are now launching monthly maternal health dialogues to share this vital information with girls and women in their respective communities. On their own initiative, they also decided to identify and track high-risk pregnancies and refer them to the closest health clinic.
While we are incredibly grateful for these successes, we remain deeply troubled by the massive U.S. foreign aid cuts and their impacts on women and girls around the world. As we have written earlier, USAID funds were vital to programs across Africa, including Kenya. They funded hospitals with staff and lifesaving medications. They vastly reduced the incidence of TB and HIV/AIDS. Unknown to many, they also provide significant funding for conservation.
Five months out from the announcement of the aid cuts, the news from Africa is not good. The cuts are disrupting formerly robust HIV, tuberculosis, and maternal health programs, leaving many, many thousands of men, women, and children without life-saving care. Essential programs that provide emergency food aid and treatment for severe malnutrition have been halted, with profound implications: UNICEF and the World Food Programme have projected that more than one million children and pregnant women will be denied treatment for acute malnutrition due to the aid freeze.
When Janet Tarakwai, our talented Data Coordinator, was a young child in the 1980's, a vast swatch of East Africa was suffering from famine. Over a million people are estimated to have died. Kenya was able to prevent widespread famine through imports of yellow maize. Forty years later, Janet still remembers that maize with deep fondness, recalling how her positive feeling for the U.S. was born from the USAID stamp on the bags of yellow corn that helped save her family and community.
Our world is forever and intricately interconnected. We believe that empathy is what defines our humanity, and that it's enough that foreign aid alleviates suffering and improves life for millions of people around the world. It's also one of the best tools we have for global engagement that helps ensure American lives are also secure.
"Development isn't charity. It's one of the smartest investments we can make in our shared future."- Former President Barack Obama
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