A recent study has connected the sudden dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development under U.S. President Donald Trump to increasing violence in some of Africa’s most vulnerable regions.
The research, published on Thursday in the journal Science, revealed that areas previously heavily reliant on USAID assistance experienced a notable and prolonged rise in conflict following the abrupt suspension of the agency’s activities.
Researchers from institutions across Europe and the United States stopped short of concluding that the aid reductions directly triggered the violence.
Nonetheless, they cautioned that sudden interruptions to major humanitarian and development programmes could further weaken communities that were already unstable.
“The abrupt withdrawal of USAID led to a significant and sustained increase in conflict across Africa’s most USAID-dependent regions,” the study stated.
Last year, the Trump administration moved to shut down USAID, terminating more than 90 per cent of its international aid contracts and slashing approximately $60 billion in global assistance funding.
The move disrupted humanitarian operations, staffing structures, procurement networks and development programmes in multiple countries.
For many years, USAID had served as one of Africa’s biggest providers of humanitarian and development support, funding governments, relief organisations and non-governmental agencies responding to insurgencies, displacement, hunger crises and weak public services.
In Nigeria, USAID financing supported humanitarian programmes in regions devastated by the Boko Haram insurgency, including food distribution, healthcare services and aid for displaced populations in the northeast.
Within Ethiopia, the agency played an important role in relief efforts in the Tigray region, where recovery has remained slow after a devastating civil conflict that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
USAID also directed substantial investment into northern Côte d’Ivoire, where authorities and international partners have sought to stop extremist groups linked to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State from expanding southward from the Sahel.
The report emerges at a time when insecurity linked to militant Islamist groups is worsening across Africa.
Figures released this week by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project showed that jihadist movements have become increasingly active across the continent and have intensified attacks on civilians over the past four years.
According to the researchers, there was a strong relationship between the withdrawal of USAID assistance and rising unrest in aid-dependent areas, although they stressed that the findings should not be interpreted as evidence that foreign aid alone prevents conflict.
Instead, they argued that the results demonstrate the risks associated with suddenly removing essential support structures from communities already struggling with insecurity, poverty and fragile institutions.
Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, warned that the consequences of the shutdown could persist even if funding is restored in the future.
“The lasting problem with the shuttering of USAID is likely going to be that for much of its conflict prevention work, even if you put back all the money, the experience is gone,” he said.
Ladd Serwat, a senior Africa analyst at ACLED, stated that some USAID-supported initiatives may previously have helped local communities resist militant influence and violence before they were discontinued.
“We now see increasing insurgency and spillover, so some of those programmes may have supported these communities from insurgent threats, and now they are no longer active,” he said.