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Yes, and if true, it would be trivially easy for people to raise money and save those lives. The fact that no one really made an effort shows a lack of belief. If relatively small amounts of money is all it takes to save African lives, they all would have been saved long ago.
I would argue that EA has been trying to pick up some of the slack. Likely they favored the most effective measures, but it seems to me that they stopped because they ran out of funds rather than because they thought that most of the things USAID funded were net negative
The truth is that before Trump, USAID was spending 12-15G$/a on global healthcare and EA (with a total budget of 1.5-2G$/a over all cause areas) is simply not in the position to simply replace the gap with some spare change.
Was there some USAID funded NGO delivering books with inspiring stories about racial justice to some structurally disadvantaged girls? Probably. Was this where the median dollar was spent? Unlikely, it seems more likely that it got into vaccination campaigns and the like.
In the past, USAID was part of a broader strategy of the US painting itself as the good guy. Sure, sometimes they would bomb the shit out of you and steal your oil, but overall they were not a terrible hegemon as these things go. Trump does not care about USAID as a tool of soft power because he does not understand soft power. His levers of foreign policy are tariffs and the US military.
The US never gets any credit for any of the great things we do (Covid vaccines being a recent example) but gets maximum blame for bad things. No one ever said how great the US was because of USAID, but when we took it away, there were howls of protest.
So I would say that, it's not just Trump. The U.S. hasn't understood soft power in a long time. Everyone hates us. So, if hated, better at least to be respected than to continue to beg for scraps of affection.
I do hope that EA's will fully fund the most effective measures with a small share of the bonanza of money coming their way post Anthropic and Open AI IPO's. Personally, I predict little progress on Africa's core problems but much higher SF real estate prices and political donations to politicians who promise to regulate AI. Perhaps I'm overly cynical. I do think that EA's in general believe what they say. It's just that they are also lazy and bullshit and status seeking, just like everyone else.
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