Dhaka has expressed its concerns over the suspension of US foreign assistance on Bangladesh and on other vulnerable countries across the world. This issue was broached by the Chief Adviser Dr Muhammad Yunus in a meeting with the US Chargé d'affaires to Bangladesh Tracey Jacobson on Wednesday.
While Dr Yunus voiced discomfort over US plan to freeze aid to more than all the 100 projects in Bangladesh, he praised US decision for continuing humanitarian support to the one million Rohingya refugees now living in Bangladesh, describing it as the most crucial for the displaced Rohingyas.
But he pointed to some serious impacts to be felt on some major projects such as the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B) which is one of the world's renowned health research institutes.
ICDDR'B seems to be the most affected due to US aid cut as it has already axed over 1,000 employees, mostly from the US agency for International Development (USAID)-funded tuberculosis project. ICDDR'B has been playing a key role in reducing deaths from diarrhoea and cholera to almost zero in Bangladesh and in countries like Haiti in the Caribbean. Additionally, an estimated 20,000 professionals working in US-funded projects across the country are now at risk of losing employment.
Not only in Bangladesh, there will be huge layoffs worldwide as USAID has planned to cut its staffers from about 10,000 to fewer than 300 globally. The huge employment was there because the agency in 2023 managed more than $40 billion in combined spending in around 130 countries.
Like many other countries, Bangladesh has been hit hard by the 90-day pause of assistance from the USAID after White House issued an executive order on January 20 to temporarily suspend USAID's operations in over 100 countries worldwide.
This is because Bangladesh has been the fourth-largest development partner of USAID after World Bank, Asian Development Bank and JICA as the US agency has been implementing over 100 projects in various sectors such as health, education, democracy, good governance and others.
All these projects except the Rohingya Response Programme are now facing closures, indicating serious disruptions in our sustainable development. Imagine, in the 2023 financial year alone, USAID disbursed nearly $500 million for Bangladesh. Additionally, in last September, the agency committed over $202 million for the fiscal year 2024-'25.
What is more worrying for us is that US aid suspension has come against the backdrop of dwindling international financial support for other non-government organizations (NGOs) for the past several years. The foreign aid spending through NGOs had accounted for $945 million in 2019 and that contracted to $741 million in 2023. This downward trajectory of aid flow into various projects may stymie our political transition as the interim government has been grappling with a series of challenges including political instability.
We call on the US government to rethink and resume its financial assistance for the suspended projects in Bangladesh and elsewhere in the world.
