‘I fear for my daughter’s future’: Families in Zimbabwe struggle to survive a year after Trump’s aid cuts

Virginia Sibanda worries that her 17-year-old daughter will be forced to elope with one of the well-off local men or one of the many gold-panners that have descended on the nearby Runde River in Zimbabwe’s parched Mwenezi district.

Ravaged by drought and dry spells over the past few years – a situation compounded by the loose soil, sand, and clay washed into the waterways by the panners – Mwenezi, in Zimbabwe’s Masvingo province, is one of the poorest villages in Zimbabwe, where a total of 1.5 million are facing hunger according to the UN's World Food Programme (WFP).

“Everyday I worry and fear that my daughter will fall pregnant for one of these gold-panners who often come to flash money in the community or that she might be enticed into having sex with one of the elderly men that are better off,” Sibanda says.

“Those who are panning for gold are able to get some money and they are using that money to entice young girls into sex, with several young girls in the community falling pregnant. I fear that my daughter will fall for this because of our situation,” she adds.

International development and humanitarian financing from the United States – under the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) – and from other western countries had been pivotal in providing food aid and in supporting income generating projects in Zimbabwe. With the impacts of the climate crisis becoming more frequent and disruptive, international aid has been a key intervention in resilience and adaptation.

However after the Trump administration essentially shut down USAID last year, communities in the region have been hammered hard and families left struggling and desperate.

Sibanda’s daughter dropped out of school after the USAID agricultural support and food assistance that was sustaining her family was abruptly cut. The little money that Sibanda could spare for school fees when USAID was helping to provide food aid is now being channeled towards survival, with the family living on only one meal a day.

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Dropping her daughter, and another of her children, out of school was a painful but necessary decision for the family. Sometimes Sibanda stays awake at night, pondering over the future of her children tears welling up in her eyes as she describes the family’s plight and her fears over her daughter’s prospects with life. "There are no jobs; there is nothing to talk about regarding employment prospects," she says.

An outbreak of January Disease – a tick-borne disease prevalent during the rainy-season from December to March – has decimated family cattle herds in that people in Mwenezi often sell-off to sustain livelihoods or pay for school feeds.

Earlier rains for the current cropping season brought hopes of bumper harvests but that too is quickly turning to despair as the current and lengthier dry spell in several of the country’s provinces has dented expectations of meaningful yields of the staple maize crop.

The UN's WFP and Food and Agriculture Organisation have been providing food assistance in other parts of Mwenezi and Zimbabwe but not in Sibanda’s area this year.

The WFP says it is stretched for resources; where it was planning to assist 538,000 people with food assistance during the current season, it will only manage to provide food aid to fewer than 200,000 people in four of Zimbabwe’s 10 provinces.

Yet it’s not just in Zimbabwe where communities that counted on international aid funding for livelihood and food programs are now struggling to move on with life after the shutdown of USAID.

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In neighbouring Malawi, the level of vulnerability and poverty has intensified since Trump slashed aid funding, Sekai Mudonhi, Malawi country representative for Catholic Relief Services (CRS), tells The Independent.

“Agriculture programmes... have been affected by the aid funding cuts and once agriculture is affected you will have a high increase in food insecurity and the poverty and level of vulnerability just increases,” she says.

Funded by USAID and other donors, CRS and other Catholic charities such as CAFOD taught farmers in Southern Africa new agriculture techniques to adapt to climate change impacts, helping to reduce these issues.

They also helped to drill boreholes in dry areas, bringing to life gardens that also acted as income generating projects for communities and individual rural farmers.

One of the projects that CRS ran in Malawi involved the disbursement of cash transfers to communities which assisted with buying of food after climate shock events such as cyclones, flooding and droughts.

“They [communities] were banking on that support,” says Mudonhi, adding that she and her team – most of whom have also had to be laid off – “had to go back to the communities and tell them that that support will no longer be coming” due to the new policy under Trump.

In Zimbabwe, Amos Batisayi has also witnessed first-hand the impact of the withdrawal of US and other international funding. He worked with the Mwenezi District Training Center (MDTC), a local NGO that utilised USAID funding for community development and humanitarian programs in the Masvingo province.

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He says that the organisation was targeting dry areas with boreholes for water access for agriculture and community water drinking in remote areas. MDTC, using USAID funding, also ran vocational training programmes for unemployed youths and provided support for income generating projects in remote areas such as Chiredzi.

With USAID shut down, irrigation schemes and gardens that had been brought to life through rehabilitation and drilling of new boreholes are now in trouble. This means that communities in remote and hard to reach areas such as Chiredzi where villagers walk up to three miles (five kilometres) to get to the nearest water source are now struggling.

“Now all these programmes have all stopped and this means that our communities, villagers and farmers are no longer able to generate an income, making their lives all the more difficult; I cant imagine what they are going through,” Batisayi says.

One such beneficiary of the USAID-funded programs under MDTC was Silence Ncube from Ramadhaka Village in Chiredzi South, some 270 miles from the capital Harare.

Ncube enrolled for vocational training as a bricklayer through financial assistance from USAID while others in her community were given the ability to start raising chickens and begin vegetable gardening.

This, she says, provided valuable skills, income opportunities and access to clean water. But when the stop orders for financing of such initiatives under USAID were issued by the Trump administration last year, Ncube and her community were hit.

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Their lives and sources of livelihoods ground to a halt and hopes for the future turned bleak. Today, they are "struggling to move on with life", she says.

The challenges of the severe drop in US funding have prompted NGOs – previously focused more on competition to secure funding – to increasingly focus on collaboration and sharing of resources, skills and data.

It is a shift that is fuelling a broader rethink regarding international aid, according to Matthias Spaeth, Zimbabwe country director for Welt Hunger Hilfe. He says that the problem of international aid funding cuts is bigger than USAID, as countries like the UK also cut funding.

He adds that his biggest fear regarding the impact of cuts to development aid is that “nothing changes” in the future and the cuts come coming at a time when communities are in dire need.

Back in Mwenezi, Sibanda hopes that one day soon donors such as the UN agencies that will return assist with food rations so that she can be able to go and pan for gold – the price of which has skyrocketed on international markets.

“If we can get donors who can assist us with food then we can have the energy to go panning for gold or if we are lucky we can get some money for income generating programmes such as farming,” she says.

This article has been produced as part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project