'No one helped me ... no one believed I'd been raped'

Donald Trump has slashed more than 600m in aid funding for contraceptives. The impact could be deadly for thousands of women, reports Bel Trew from Uganda and Zimbabwe

- Bel Trew

Annette was just 16 and walking to school in rural Uganda when she was raped - an attack that left her pregnant, penniless and alone. Her family and community blamed her and cut her off, leaving the teenager to struggle with her baby by herself.

A friend at the same school also fell pregnant. Rather than struggle like Annette, she decided to hide it and get a backstreet abortion. “She didn’t want her parents to know about it, so she decided to abort,” says Annette, now 19, with a disarming frankness. “She was given some drugs and lost a lot of blood but didn’t want to be rushed to hospital as she was scared her parents would find out. She bled to death.”

Terrified of a similar fate, Annette continued with her pregnancy, dropping out of school to wash clothes for 50p a time. “People talked a lot about me behind my back and no one helped me. No one believed that I had been raped.”

Annette feared she might be attacked again and turned to MSI Reproductive Choices - a global charity providing contraceptives to nearly 40 million women and girls worldwide.

Today at an MSI-supported clinic 65km (40 miles) north of the capital Kampala, she is being given a three-year contraceptive implant that costs just $10 but is impossibly expensive for her. She credits it with allowing her to get her life back and finish her education.

But that contraceptive support is now in jeopardy after Donald Trump cut hundreds of millions of dollars of US foreign assistance to family planning programmes worldwide by dismantling USAID.

According to analysis by