When Donald Trump set about dismantling USAID, many around the world were shocked. But on the ground in Sierra Leone, the latest betrayal was not unexpected "They were all mercenaries'

EARLIER THIS YEAR, Donald Trump appointed a 28-year-old Doge alumnus, Jeremy Lewin, to oversee his administration's approach to global aid.

- Mara Kardas-Nelson

Lewin's primary task has been to gut the US's aid funding. In an interview with the New York Times, Lewin argued that the traditional approach, which he termed the "global humanitarian complex", didn't help poor countries "progress beyond aid", instead keeping them dependent. The system, he continued, has "demonstrably failed".

This isn't just the Trump administration's view. For decades, there has been a robust debate in academic and policy circles that aid isn't working, or at least not as promised. When the news of Trump's USAID cuts broke this year, President Hakainde Hichilema of Zambia told the Financial Times that cuts in aid were "long overdue" and would force countries such as his to "take care of our own affairs".

Earlier this year, a few weeks after the Trump administration began dismantling USAID, I visited Sierra Leone, west Africa. I had worked there as a global health practitioner from 2015 to 2018, and in the years since I had returned often, this time as a journalist. The more I visited, the more I wondered about the effectiveness of foreign consultants deploying technocratic approaches to entrenched poverty. Not long before my spring visit, I had published a book about microfinance, once hailed as a solution to world poverty, but which I had begun to see as deeply problematic.

Despite these reservations, I knew that suddenly cutting off US funding would have huge - and in many places disastrous - consequences. In the months since USAID has been slashed, there have been reports of children starving in Myanmar and pregnant women unable to get antenatal care in Malawi, among many bleak examples. One study suggests that 14 million people could die because of the aid cuts.

I worried about my friends and former colleagues in Sierra Leone.