<
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jan/29/australia-foreign-aid-pacific-trump-usaid-freeze-a-year-on>
"About a year ago, the Trump administration abruptly withdrew funding from an
Australian project feeding and educating tens of thousands of schoolchildren in
Timor-Leste.
Almost half the children under five in the country – which has a population of
about 1.4 million, with about 157,000 under five – are stunted due to
malnutrition.
A year later, the Care Australia project known as Hatutan is operating, but at
a fraction of that level.
Globally, dozens of people – most of them children – are dying needlessly every
hour since the US gutted its foreign aid program, ripping tens of billions of
dollars out and changing the way it is delivered.
In Australia’s region, the loss of critical funding for health, nutrition,
education and climate change is having an ongoing effect.
Bianca Collier, Care Australia’s director of international programs and
operations, says education, nutrition, health and disaster risk-reduction
programs in the Pacific are stopped with “devastating” consequences.
“So pretty much everything you could imagine that we were doing,” she says.
Collier says not only is there a moral imperative to look after our neighbours,
there are also economic incentives to help them do well as well as broader
global concerns such as climate change, vaccination schedules to stop diseases
spreading and sturdy health systems to prevent pandemics.
“And we had been seeing increasing investment from the US in the region to
counter China, and to build those diplomatic relationships and ties,” she says.
Care Australia’s Hatutan project received about US$26m over five years to feed
about 70,000 children in Timor-Leste.
When that funding was pulled last year, staff who themselves did not have a lot
of resources had to be let go.
“It was just, OK, the funding has ended today and you need to stop,” Collier
says.
“It’s also impacted our reputation in the country because if you’re in a
community, normally you would give them a longer lead time to say we’re going
to be stopping this program in a few months.
“But we were like … we’ve got no money from tomorrow. So the urgency of it was
pretty terrifying.”
Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade stepped in to help the
Hatutan project, so they were able to rehire some staff and now can afford to
help 12,000 children.
At Care International, 48 US-funded programs across 31 countries, helping about
18.4 million people, were closed."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
