How a rural health NGO kept going after Trump cut funding

Despite the US pulling the plug, Hlokomela Clinic is finding ways to ensure patients can still get tested and treated for HIV.

- By Zano Kunene

When Sindy Nkuna woke up to an email saying that the US had decided to temporarily freeze all foreign aid in January, it was scary.

"I felt shattered," she says. "For days I had racing heartbeats thinking, what's going to happen to me and to my kids? It was unbelievable. I have two boys."

A data capturer, Nkuna worked at the Hlokomela Clinic, 200km from Polokwane, keeping track of HIV information in the fruit and game farming community of the Mopani district in Limpopo.

The funding for her job - and six HIV testing counsellors, a site coordinator and part of their financial manager's salary - came from the Anova Health Institute, the HIV organisation that received the most funding in South Africa from the US President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar).

Nkuna sat at home anxiously waiting to hear if she would still have a job. Then word came that almost all US funding, which included many of the Pepfar-sponsored projects, would be permanently ended.

Overnight, Hlokomela was left without its HIV field testing team, funding for equipment like cooler bags and transport costs for mobile testing clinics. Fifty sites that helped test 1,000 people a month were shuttered.

"It was worse than Covid," says Christine du Preez, who founded Hlokomela in 2005.

But Hlokomela was better equipped to deal with the crisis than many other organisations that also lost their US funding. Here's how the plans it has made are helping it to get by.