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By Winnie Kamau
Nairobi, Kenya: Reprieve for aid workers and suppliers of the U.S. Agency for International Development, following a court ruling. The order temporarily lifts a three-week funding freeze that has shut down U.S. aid and development work worldwide. The sudden shutdown has allegedly led to massive damage on the nonprofits and other organizations that help carry out U.S. assistance overseas.
According to AP, Justice Amir Ali issued the temporary order giving reprieve to aid groups and others who had a sudden and absolute cutoff of USAID funds for programs abroad.
The funding cutoff is said to have left contractors, farmers and suppliers in the U.S. and around the world without hundreds of millions of dollars in pay for work already done and forced wide scale layoffs among those enterprises.
The lawsuit was lodged by two organizations, the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and the Global Health Council, representing health organizations receiving U.S. funds for work abroad.
President Trump’s Executive Orders issued on 20th January 2025 dubbed Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid is said to have affected USAID.
“The United States foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values. They serve to destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries” President Trump stated in the order.
USAID whose website has been shutdown, was born in 1961 during President John F. Kennedy’s administration, and was created with the goal of fostering economic and social development around the world.
A look at the International Aid Transparency Inititative (IATI) data reveals that USAID has reported 51,740 completed activities and 2,922 ongoing activities. During the 2023-2025 period, USAID funding was allocated to 154 countries.
The top 20 recipient countries received over 51 billion USD in 2023 and 2024, according to Dportal data.
