The non-governmental organisation (NGO) Observatório do Cidadão para a Saúde (OCS) (Citizen’s Observatory for Health) argued on Thursday (13) that Mozambique should think about strategies to reduce its external dependence in the face of the cut in US international aid, considering that the measure has an ‘enormous impact’ on the country, Lusa reported .
According to the agency, the director of the NGO, Jorge Matine, said: ‘As a country, we always have to think about how to reduce external dependence, but also how to improve co-operation because there are issues that Mozambique will not be able to solve on its own, it needs the learning and support of other countries.’
He pointed out that more than 70 per cent of the Mozambican public health system in the areas of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, family planning and laboratories depends on funds from donors, including the government of the United States of America (USA), which is among the main ones, so the suspension of funding has a ‘huge and significant impact’ on the country’s health services.
‘It’s a significant impact, there will be a stoppage of services (…) It’s very difficult for the government, in less than three to six months, to mobilise enough resources to replace the American funds. That won’t be possible,’ he emphasised.
Matine defended the need for the Mozambican government to negotiate with the US and other donors an ‘acceptable timeframe’, between one and two years, to ‘gradually start thinking’ about internal strategies to reorganise the financing of health services, warning of future ‘shocks’.
‘We have to learn that, in addition to pandemic shocks, we’re going to have jolts like this from the government over which we have no control (…). That’s why we need to coordinate aid better so that it doesn’t create too much dependency, but at the same time how to take advantage of co-operation to strengthen what is our national health system,’ he said.
Trump’s new term and suspension of US aid
In the first days of his second term, US President Donald Trump suspended all international aid for 90 days, with the exception of humanitarian food programmes and military aid to Israel and Egypt.
Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to be the region most affected by this decision. Mozambique, for example, has been allocated tens of millions of dollars for HIV/AIDS and emergency food programmes in 2023.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio will be the new acting director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which he accused of being ‘completely lacking in responsiveness’, criticising the ‘insubordination’ in that body.
USAID – whose website disappeared without explanation – has been one of the federal agencies most targeted by the new administration.
Trump, as well as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), entrepreneur Elon Musk, and some Republican congressmen have criticised USAID – which oversees humanitarian, development and security programmes in around 120 countries – in increasingly harsh terms, accusing it of promoting progressive causes.
