USAID funding freeze fails children globally
Read in full: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4642(25)00068-9/fulltext?dgcid=raven_jbs_aip_email
'The Trump Administration's sudden freeze of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) foreign assistance has thrown global child and adolescent health initiatives into turmoil, grinding to a halt programmes that support some of the world's most vulnerable populations...'
'The freeze on USAID funding has profoundly affected family planning and reproductive health, according to Onikepe Owolabi and Elizabeth Sully of the Guttmacher Institute (Washington DC, USA). “After just one week of the freeze, we estimated that 900 000 women and girls were denied essential care,” Owolabi said, citing projections based on USAID funding patterns. “After one month, that number will reach 4 million, and by the end of the 90-day review period, we estimate that 11·7 million women and girls will have lost access to reproductive health care.” Without contraceptive access, unintended pregnancies will surge. “We estimate that 4·2 million unintended pregnancies will occur this year because of the freeze, and over 8000 women will die from pregnancy-related complications,” she said.'
Read more from Onikepe Owolabi and colleagues:
https://www.guttmacher.org/2025/01/family-planning-impact-trump-foreign-...
COMMENT (NPW): Onikepe Owolabi is also the lead author of the following analysis of a HIFA/CHIFA discussion with 658 messages from 193 contributors from 45 countries worldwide:
O O Owolabi, Claire Glenton, Simon Lewin and Neil Pakenham-Walsh. Stakeholder views on the incorporation of traditional birth attendants into the formal health systems of low-and middle-income countries: a qualitative analysis of the HIFA2015 and CHILD2015 email discussion forums. BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth 2014, 14:118 doi:10.1186/1471-2393-14-118
https://bmcpregnancychildbirth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2...
CHIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org