The Trump administration officially ended decades of global health aid to Zimbabwe on Wednesday, cutting off funding for HIV and infectious disease prevention efforts after Zimbabwean officials rejected an “America first” health deal.
The affected programs would receive a short period to “responsibly close operations,” a State Department spokesperson told The Washington Post, adding that Washington was “committed to an orderly handover.”
Negotiations over the five-year, $367 million agreement covering HIV, tuberculosis, malaria and other health priorities collapsed in February. The State Department proposed making aid conditional to the U.S.’s ability to access sensitive medical and biological data from the Zimbabwean government, related to a wider push to gain access to valuable mineral stores.
More than 30 countries signed similar agreements with the U.S.
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Officials from Zimbabwe, one of a handful of nations that refused the terms, said the proposal failed to guarantee their country would benefit from medical advances developed using that information. Zimbabwean government spokesperson Nick Mangwana called the arrangement “asymmetrical” at its core.
“When financial assistance is contingent upon concessions that touch upon national sovereignty, data sovereignty or access to strategic resources, it fundamentally alters the nature of the relationship from one of partnership to one of unequal exchange. This we cannot accept,” he said in February.
On top of those stipulations, the U.S. officials indicated they were only willing to spend a fraction of what they paid in previous longstanding commitments, while requiring Zimbabwe to more than double its spending on the health programs over the next four years.
U.S. funding has supported salaries and training for 8,300 health workers, along with laboratory services and disease detection capacity at approximately 1,900 facilities, according to Health GAP, an organization that advocates for access to HIV treatment and prevention.
“The human costs will be catastrophic,” the organization’s executive director wrote on Tuesday, urging both governments to resume negotiations and calling for emergency funding to protect critical health services.
The dispute reflects the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to uproot foreign health assistance and last year’s massive cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development — moves officials say are meant to reduce dependence on aid
“We must keep what is good about our health foreign assistance programs while rapidly fixing what is broken,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said earlier this month.
Zimbabwean officials pledged this week to raise government spending and to seek funding from the Global Fund, an organization focused on fighting AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
Meanwhile, officials are trying to preserve some critical health services scheduled for the chopping block. The National AIDS Council began reviewing which programs could be absorbed into its national response, adding that the organization would prioritize the procurement and distribution of antiretroviral drugs, according to Zimbabwean media outlet The Herald.
Neither Zimbabwe’s government nor global health nonprofits have the resources to absorb the full cost of the withdrawn U.S. support, according to Health GAP.
The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.
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