A year after United States President Donald Trump cut funding to its Agency for International Development (USAID), the crisis in Malawi’s healthcare service has deepened.
It has undone decades of progress in fighting HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis and has severely impacted services like free contraception provided at family planning clinics.
The Family Planning Association of Malawi (FPAM), a NGO that was a cornerstone of rural healthcare, has been forced to halt its mobile clinics that served as the only medical link for remote villages.
“We had two big grants that were supporting our work, particularly in areas where there were no other service providers,” said executive director Donald Makwakwa.
“We are likely to lose out on all the successes that we have registered over the years,” he said.
A resident of a village once served by the NGO said there has been an explosion in unplanned pregnancies since its clinic stopped work.
“I know of nearly 25 girls in my village who got pregnant when FPAM suspended its services here last year,” said Maureen Maseko at a clinic on the brink of collapse.
“Now that it has resumed services, I’m sure that cases of early pregnancies will drop, because the FPAM provides contraceptives and condoms to the youth to ensure that they continue with their education.”
There has also been a significant reduction in the support, treatment, and care for people with HIV-Aids.
Chisomo Nkwanga, an HIV-positive man who lives in the northern town of Mzuzu, said the end of US-funded specialised care was like a death sentence.
After his normal provider of life-saving antiretroviral therapy (ART) vanished due to budget cuts, he turned to a public hospital.
“The healthcare worker shouted at me in front of others,” Nkwanga recalled.
“They said, ‘You gay, you are now starting to patronise our hospitals because the whites who supported your evil behaviour have stopped?'”
“I gave up,” he said, trembling. “I am a living dead.”
More than one million of Malawi’s roughly 22 million people live with HIV and the United States previously provided 60 percent of its HIV treatment budget.
Researchers estimate that hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths have been caused globally by the Trump administration’s dismantling of US foreign aid.
Source: Africanews
