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The international landscape is changing faster than ever. Budget cuts, national interests, and geopolitical shifts are pushing global cooperation and health programmes into uncertain waters. This article explores the impact of these changes on development cooperation, local communities, and health systems worldwide, and shows how new strategies and partnerships are emerging in the midst of this storm.

The year 2025 is one big tropical storm that refuses to subside. The name of the storm is Donald, and he is sweeping across the world at full force, ever since his inauguration on 20 January as the president of the United States. The course of the storm is likely even more erratic than the unpredictable weather patterns resulting from climate change.

Donald leaves traces everywhere. A trade war he has unleashed is causing major fluctuations in the stock markets and uncertainty among entrepreneurs and citizens active on the stock exchange. The United States is no longer a natural ally of Europe.

At home, Donald is sawing away at the foundations of the rule of law, despite the long democratic tradition of the United States. He has launched an attack on the independent judiciary and journalism; judges and journalists are continuously discredited. Critical universities are denied government funding, and students are arrested because they participated in protests against the war in Gaza.

Cuts to development cooperation

Donald also has major consequences for global development cooperation. He has halted nearly all crucial USAID programmes. When it comes to cuts to development cooperation, he is not alone. The Netherlands (30 percent), the United Kingdom (40 percent), Germany (50 percent), France (25 percent), and Belgium (25 percent) are also taking a knife to development budgets. The way this is done varies from immediate and abrupt (the United States , and then seeing whether the courts will stop it) to gradual (the Netherlands, where existing programmes and commitments are respected).

What is also new is the narrative being used. Development cooperation is no longer about justice, human dignity, or keeping the world livable together, which requires sharing some of our prosperity, but about self-interest. International cooperation has (again) become transactional.

In June 2025, the Trump administration mediates a peace agreement between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), intended to end years of border conflicts and tensions in the Great Lakes region. The agreement is signed in Washington D.C. and is internationally regarded as a diplomatic success and a step toward stability in one of Africa’s most resource-rich regions.

However, American involvement turns out not to be purely altruistic. In return for its mediating role, the United States gains access to strategic minerals and supply chains in the DRC, including cobalt, copper, and lithium, essential for the production of batteries, semiconductors and other technologies that fuel the energy transition and defence industry.

Aid must above all deliver returns. The Netherlands is no exception. Already in the first sentence of the February 2025 policy brief Ontwikkelingshulp by Minister Klever, it states: “This cabinet once again prioritises the interests of the Netherlands, including within the Foreign Trade and Development Aid portfolio. This fits with the changing power dynamics in the world. We are going to do things differently.”

In an interview with De Telegraaf (November 2024), the now former minister states: “Dutch entrepreneurs must bring in more money. One-third of our income is earned through trade abroad. We want to increase that by deploying development aid.” Although Klever’s party, the PVV, left the government in June 2025, Dutch development policy is still based on her policy brief.

Halting USAID projects

The cuts to development cooperation have major consequences. Above all, the near-complete shutdown of USAID leaves deep marks. It affects dozens of countries and millions of people at once. Programmes that for years formed the backbone of health care, food security and education are suddenly halted. In African countries, this means HIV clinics close, malaria prevention stalls, and vaccination campaigns are cancelled. A study by the University of California estimates that this could lead to more than fourteen million additional deaths by 2030, including more than four million young children.

The indirect consequences are also significant. Local health organisations lose not only funding but also expertise and coordination. Decades of building health systems crumble, leaving governments in vulnerable countries unable to absorb the sudden shortages. Where USAID once collaborated with local partners to prevent epidemics, there are now empty offices and unpaid nurses.

The cuts also undermine global health security. Less surveillance of infectious diseases means that outbreaks are detected later and regional crises can more quickly become global threats. What began as a political intervention in Washington may end as a health crisis in Kinshasa or Kampala.

For the countries that have relied on American support for decades, the message is clear: solidarity is no longer self-evident. Health, just like peace and trade, has become a matter of power and interests.

Responses to the cuts

Across the world, there is astonishment at the dismantling of USAID, which accounts for 40% of global aid. “This is a frontal attack on human dignity that will cause immeasurable suffering,” says Alistair Dutton, secretary-general of Caritas International.

But after the initial shock, increasing bewilderment sounds from African countries. Isn’t it absurd, they ask, that we are still so dependent on Western development aid? How is this possible, and how can we change it?

According to Cameroonian economist Célestine Monga, development aid has often bound Africa more than it has freed it. “Anyone who takes themselves seriously would not beg for small amounts for sixty or seventy years,” he says in an interview with NRC. If Africa wants to determine its own course, the first step, he argues, is not more aid but liberation from it. Targeted investments in industrialisation, infrastructure and local entrepreneurship should enable African countries to take control of their own development. The shock of so much aid being cut could finally set this in motion.

Others point out that the cuts may lead citizens in low- and middle-income countries to hold their own governments much more accountable for the governance of their country; to exert more pressure on corruption and political decisions that do not benefit the majority of the population. Young people may play an important role in this, as the mass Gen Z protests in Kenya last year and Tanzania this year already demonstrated.

Improvers versus Reimaginers

Within the Dutch development sector, an interesting debate is taking shape.
Researchers such as Sara Kinsbergen and Zunera Rana observe that this debate is increasingly defined along two lines: that of the “improvers” and that of the “reimaginers”. The former try to improve the existing system of development cooperation by limiting the damage of the cuts, using funds more efficiently and giving local partners more say. The second group wants to radically overhaul the system. They ask fundamental questions about power, dependency and the colonial legacy of aid, and advocate full sovereignty and locally led development models.

This divide is visible not only in ideas but also geographically: most improver narratives come from institutions and thinkers in the Global North; while reimagining perspectives are voiced mainly in the Global South. Yet both camps share one conviction: the existing system of development cooperation is no longer adequate. The question is not whether it must change, but how, and above all: who gets to decide.

This search for direction also holds up a mirror to the Netherlands. While ministries and NGOs try to plug budget gaps and save ongoing programmes, young professionals, diaspora organisations and local partners increasingly feel the desire to fundamentally rethink the aid relationship. No longer as a one-way movement from North to South, but as a reciprocal process of knowledge, responsibility and power.

Wake-Up call

In October 2025, Vice Versa Global, together with Sara Kinsbergen and the University of Nairobi, brings together a diverse group of changemakers in Nairobi for the event “Beyond the Development Cooperation Budget Cuts: From Lived Experience to Shared Roadmaps.” From community leaders to academics, from media professionals to government representatives, the participants share their experiences with the recent cuts and reflect on their impact on their organisations and communities. What stands out is the optimism: while many are affected by the sudden shortages, most do not see this as a crisis, but as a wake-up call to fundamentally reform the system.

A red thread through the conversations is the desire to reclaim agency and ownership: determining research agendas themselves, leading local projects and (re)shaping development cooperation from within their own communities. For many participants, this means critically questioning traditional aid relations, in which the Global North often determines the pace and content.

In the midst of Donald’s storm of cuts and geopolitical shifts, another story emerges. In Nairobi, participants show that agency, sovereignty and local leadership are not abstract ideals but living possibilities. For the Global North, and for the Netherlands, this means that development cooperation can no longer be one-way traffic, but must be a partnership of equals, with local leaders determining the pace and the course.

The storm continues to rage, but precisely in the force of this crisis, new paths, new voices and new ways of collaborating are emerging. In this way, uncertainty becomes not only a threat, but also a catalyst for real change.