Rwakakamba Morrison
The Donald Trump administration shut down USAID. For 2025, USAID programs in Uganda had dedicated at least $306 million, mainly for healthcare, research, and refugee support. With this closure, over 15,000 jobs vanished, and many families were deeply disrupted.
The halt was immediate — people had no time to prepare. The taxman also lost billions of shillings in expected Pay-As-You-Earn (PAYE) tax revenue. Uganda’s budget architecture will now out of necessity reform to fund its vitals.
Consequential and promising research into vaccines and drugs was abandoned. But policy is policy, and I believe that’s what American voters wanted.
Ugandans in the NGO sector now know that this sector, as we knew it, is largely gone. The foundations of this sector have been anchored on the generosity of the “haves” helping the “have-nots” — not on sustainable empowerment built on economic freedom fundamentals. Even advocacy NGOs pursuing governance and human rights have often ignored the dividends of true freedom that come from economically empowered households and communities. Poor people have no real agency and cannot enjoy the truest forms of human rights.
With Uganda rolling out the Parish Development Model — aimed at monetising productivity at the grassroots — global capital will converge in a new form. Trump and other global powers want coffee, bananas, cocoa, etc. USAID (or its successor) will return in a different form to partner with farmerpreneurs, entrepreneurs, and firms in verticals delivering products the world can’t do without. This is the real economy!
To my friends who lost out from USAID: let’s pivot and push into some of these business verticals.
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Based in Uganda. Working to empower citizen agency to pursue large scale change in Uganda, Africa and the World.
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