Reporting on China's move to provide global aid as U.S. pulls out

0:00Hey, it's Rob. Before we get to today's episode, we wanted to ask you to do us a favor. We want to know what you think about Consider This. What interests you? What you like and what you don't like? What keeps you listening? That's why we're hoping you'll take a couple of minutes to fill out the NPR News Podcast listener survey. You can find it at npr.org slash spring survey. And please do not be shy. We want to hear from everyone, even our new listeners and those who might not have taken one of our surveys before. Yes, that means you. Okay, on to today's episode. This past year, NPR Global Health and Development correspondent Fatma Tanis has been digging into the global impact of billions of dollars of USAID being cut from programs around the world.

0:45A lot of the headlines in the U.S. focused on Washington, the chaos, the ideology, the politics. So Fatma went to Uganda last September to find out what it looked like on the ground. What she found was something unexpected, not anger, but something harder to explain. I really got the sense of how the U.S. is just viewed as this, like, major superpower. I remember one community elder who kept referring to Donald Trump as Father Trump when he was talking about, you know, the aid cuts. Fatma was struck by the description. And I asked him, why are you calling him father? And he said, well, he's the provider.

1:30Father Trump. That phrase, equal parts reverence and bewilderment, captures something about how U.S. foreign aid has functioned for decades. Not just as money, but as identity, as presence, as power. Consider this. The United States spent decades building influence abroad through foreign aid. Now that it's pulling back, other powers are lining up to fill the void.

1:58From NPR, I'm Rob Schmitz. This message comes from Angie. If you're tackling a home project, check out Angie.com. From roofing to remodels and everything in between, Angie connects you with skilled pros who do such a good job, you might trust them to do other things, like pull out your tooth or be your kid's godfather. Don't actually ask them to do those things. Just let them get the job done well. Angie, the one you trust to find the ones you trust. Find a pro for your projects at Angie.com. That's A-N-G-I dot com.

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3:04It's Consider This from NPR. The U.S. spent decades and billions of dollars building global influence, funding clinics, coaching programs, disease prevention. Now that that money is gone, NPR global health and development correspondent Fatma Tanis went to Uganda to see what's left and who the new players are that are moving in. In Uganda, you still see the remnants of USAID everywhere you go. Posters and murals with, you know, the American flag, guidelines about how to deal with like the COVID-19 pandemic. You kind of see that, see that everywhere on the ground. And then on the other hand, in the big cities, like the shopping malls are Chinese built.

3:48The roads that you're taking to go everywhere are Chinese built. The GPS in the cars that people are driving are Chinese GPS. And people are definitely sort of aware of what's coming from where. And, you know, the Chinese sort of strategy of aid has long been focused on infrastructure, these big, big infrastructure projects. But they have also run into some issues with that, you know, issues of quality. You know, when we were driving on those roads, like a lot of there were a lot of places where they had been pretty messed up and nobody was fixing it. So, you know, at one point that road was beautiful and paved, but now when you're driving on it, it's like potholes everywhere.

4:33But, you know, China is changing its approach. And that's something that I've been looking into because of these, a lot of the criticism around the way that it does its aid has been hampering its reputation. And so they've been taking an approach that's slightly more similar to what the U.S. had been doing, which is to fund these small projects here and there to win hearts and minds. They actually call them small and beautiful projects, which, you know, go from any like their various different, you know, building a bridge in an island or refurbishing maternal ward in Zimbabwe, helping, you know, medical supplies get into a Latin American country.

5:20And so at a moment when the U.S. is moving away from its model of aid and moving more toward a bilateral version, you see China moving the other way. And that's something that's really interesting to watch. Yeah, that's interesting because I used to cover China. And back when I was covering China, China would focus its aid on, like you said, infrastructure like roads, public transportation, and especially ports. And a lot of it was built partly to help that country, but also to take resources from that country and then quickly export them to China. So it was in many ways self-serving. What you're saying right now is that they're actually shifting to other types of aid basically to help that country develop in its healthcare and also for education, things like that.

6:14But that is an interesting change for a superpower like China. Absolutely. And I think there's something interesting there because the way that governments like the U.S. and China do aid, I mean, there's always an element of it being self-serving. But I think the way that China did it was so obvious that, you know, people viewed in many places like Kenya and others, they viewed Chinese aid as suspicious. Like, okay, you're building a support, but what are you going to get from us? That kind of transactionality was so, so obvious in a way that it wasn't with U.S. aid. And I think now China is moving toward a more subtle form of aid.

6:56But I think it's still very much eyeing the positive returns that it's going to get. Because when China builds a bridge in an island, there's still positive gains for China. People will view it positively, and that's still a gain. I mean, do the folks that you're speaking to, for example, in Uganda and in other African countries, Are they starting to see China in an aspirational way, like they saw the U.S. as an aspirational country? I don't think that China's new model has sort of, I think it's still new in that sense. I think it hasn't had that, like, the decades of influence that U.S. aid has.

7:42But I think certainly, you know, China's biggest advantage, perhaps, is the fact that the U.S. is pulling away. And so right now, where the U.S. is not giving anything, China is. And that alone is a win for them. Yeah. So, Fama, I wanted to get also into how you report when you're, you know, on the ground. You know, there's this thing that happens in reporting where you go out to cover one story, especially in developing countries, this happens a lot, especially to me, and you end up noticing something completely different and then you're kind of, you know, pulled in a different direction. How often does that happen to you?

8:25And did that happen to you while you're working on these stories, you know, when you're covering aid from China and things like that? Yeah, it certainly does. And I do, you know, when I'm planning my reporting, that's something I definitely build in space for both, you know, logistically, but also mentally. Most recently, when I was in Uganda, there was one story I was working on, you know, obviously, we were covering the USAID shutdown and its impacts and like the change in foreign aid policy. However, I also wanted to do stories that had nothing to do with that. And so there was this one program in a rural part of Uganda that I was profiling.

9:05It was a program meant to push people who were living in extreme poverty out by giving them some cash and coaching. It's a program that has had high rates of success elsewhere. and this one was doing something interesting. It was not funded or supported in any way by the US. It was funded privately. And so, you know, we're out there in the field, we're talking to participants of these programs, trying to understand how their lives are changing with, you know, the help of this cash and the coaching. And we realized that there had been something that was stopping people from like being able to invest as much as they could have or they had been encouraged to in building their businesses.

9:57And it turned out to be that the U.S. aid cuts had caused a serious slowdown in the local economy because people who weren't in the program, people in the area who had been receiving aid, no longer had the resources to spend money in the markets. And that was affecting local businesses. It was also affecting these people in the program who were trying to build businesses. So even a story that I was intentionally trying to do outside of the aid cuts ended up being dragged into it. Fatma Tennis is a global health and development correspondent for NPR. Fatma, thanks so much. Thank you for having me.

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11:16It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Rob Schmitz. This message comes from Angie. Tackling a home project, Angie can connect you with pros who do such a good job, you might ask them to be your kid's godfather. Don't do that. Just trust them to get the job done. Find a pro for your projects at Angie.com. That's A-N-G-I dot com.