Africa

1. Scramble to plug USAID gap
2. Startups target gig workers
3. Senegal’s misreported debt
4. Mali gold output plunges
5. Weekend Reads

The Bienal de São Paulo comes to Zanzibar.

The fallout from the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID persists this week. Even as the US government says multiple waivers have been approved to continue funding for certain lifesaving programs, uncertainty abounds across the continent: The countries and organizations who rely on US assistance are scrambling for resources to keep services from food kitchens to Ebola surveillance systems in operation, as we look at below.

A highly charged debate about the agency has been playing out in Capitol Hill too. House Republicans on Thursday defended the administration’s cuts, arguing that the American people had been “betrayed” by an unwieldy agency that they claim is rife with waste and fraud. The Democrats countered that the dismantling of USAID was in fact a betrayal of American values, both to its own citizens and the millions of people around the world who rely on its services.

The problem is it’s nearly impossible to simply turn things back after a disruption of this proportion. “We don’t disagree with an audit on USAID,” Congresswoman Sheila Cherfilus-Mccormick, a Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told me, “but it’s [about the] implementation — there’s too much collateral damage.”

🟡 If you want to explore the impact of USAID’s cuts, our Weekend Reads section rounds up the smartest analysis on what this means for the continent.

Africa races to fill USAID gap

Nigeria committed $200 million to fill the funding void left by the US suspension of health aid in Africa’s most populous country as it approved its $36.6 billion budget for 2025. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization said it would release an additional $2 million to support Uganda’s response to its latest Ebola outbreak. The pause in US funding has already affected contact tracing and screening of departing international travelers, an American official told CBS News last week. The uncertainty around the future of USAID, the world’s single biggest aid donor, is raising urgent questions about which countries and blocs will step in to support vital aid projects in Africa. Romilly Greenhill, CEO of Bond, a UK network of international development organizations, told Semafor the US cuts were undermining the country’s own interests to “ensure global health security,” and urged the international community to help mitigate the impact of the USAID freeze.

— Preeti Jha

Nigeria fintechs target gig workers

A growing crop of Nigeria-born startups are offering US-based bank accounts to freelance workers and businesses in a move to capitalize on Africa’s booming gig economy.

Partnerships with lenders licensed by central banks enable the startups to offer dollar, pound sterling, and euro accounts for international money transfers and debit cards for online purchases.

Raenest, a digital banking startup founded in 2022, raised $11 million this week in a funding round led by Virginia-based QED Investors. It has processed $1 billion in transfers for more than 600,000 individual users. And next month Grey, another fintech startup, will allow its nearly 2 million users to send money to more than 100 countries through their dollar account, its CEO Idorenyin Obong told Semafor.

Senegal’s growing debt crisis

The ratio of Senegal’s government debt to gross domestic product in 2023, according to the country’s Court of Auditors — far higher than the previously recorded figure of 74.4%. President Bassirou Diomaye Faye ordered an audit of the country’s finances shortly after he took office in April 2024. The court’s long-awaited report, published on Wednesday, corroborated the audit’s finding that Senegal’s public debt and budget deficit were significantly higher than previously reported, prompting a slump in Senegal’s sovereign Eurobonds. In a note, Leo Morawiecki, a debt specialist at investment company abrdn, said the International Monetary Fund will now “almost certainly move Senegal from [a] moderate to high risk of debt distress.”

Mali records drop in gold production

Gold production in Mali dropped by 23% to 51 metric tons last year. The figures, released by the mines ministry, come as Bamako remains embroiled in a high-profile tax dispute with Canadian miner Barrick Gold. The company’s December output is not included in the latest statistics. Barrick suspended operations in Mali last month after authorities seized its gold reserves by helicopter and detained four of its employees on charges including money laundering, which the company denies. Barrick’s CEO told Reuters that it plans to reopen its shuttered operations once Mali allows it to resume gold shipments.

Weekend Reads

This week we’re focusing on the impact of the USAID cuts on the continent and the conversations it’s triggering about the role of aid.

• The Trump administration has already begun to formally cancel hundreds of USAID contracts and grants, Devex reported, citing sources and internal documents. The terminated programs include one that had been attracting private investment for small businesses across southern Africa and another that was connecting rural communities in East Africa to the internet “to counter Chinese infrastructure investments,” it wrote.

• The consequences of the USAID cuts are being felt across the continent. In war-hit Sudan, soup kitchens operated by national food programs reliant on the agency can no longer feed the hungry, reported The Washington Post, while those providing emergency health services are unable to function without further funds.

• The White House’s claim that it lifted its ban on lifesaving humanitarian aid after applying the 90-day aid freeze last month is “not true,” according to ProPublica. The apparent waivers have sparked widespread confusion. “Many groups doing such lifesaving work either don’t know the right way to request an exemption to the order… or have no sense of where their request stands,” it found.

• The USAID cuts are “a painful reminder that aid dependence isn’t a viable development strategy,” writes Ken Opalo in An Africanist Perspective. He says many governments across the continent have the “bandwidth within their budgets to plug any holes” left by the departure of US funding. But the abrupt nature of the withdrawal has offered no time for the critical planning this requires, disrupting lifesaving interventions and threatening the collapse of health surveillance.

• The humanitarian industrial complex should be dismantled, argues Kathryn Mathers in Africa Is a Country, but not by a “billionaire-backed administration with no plan beyond abandonment.” The author of White Saviorism and Popular Culture writes that Western donor funding “always came with strings” and the current crisis could be “a reset opportunity” for the region, but not in the way it is being decimated now.

— Preeti

Business & Macro

🇰🇪 The Central Bank of Kenya raised $1 billion from an infrastructure bond sale it said was oversubscribed.

🇳🇬 Heineken-owned Nigerian Breweries said its losses after tax for the financial year up to December 2024 widened 36.5% year-on-year despite a 79% revenue growth to more than 1 trillion naira.

Climate & Energy

🇳🇬 Africa Energy Bank, a new lender created by Afreximbank and the African Petroleum Producers Organization to fund oil and gas projects, will begin operations this quarter with $5 billion in equity.

Geopolitics & Policy

🇸🇩 Sudan has reached a “complete agreement” with Russia for Moscow to set up its first naval base in Africa on its Red Sea coast, Sudan’s Foreign Minister Ali Youssef Ahmed al-Sharif said.

🇿🇼 Zimbabwe will compensate 94 farmers from Switzerland, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and other countries who lost land during Harare’s controversial land reforms in the early 2000s. It plans to clear a $146 million compensation bill by 2028.

Tech & Deals

🇰🇪 The World Bank’s International Finance Corporation extended a $15 million loan to the Royal Garments Group, a Kenyan clothing manufacturing company.

🇨🇮 Ivorian private equity firm Adiwale Partners invested in Jus Délice, a Togolese producer of organic pineapple juice and concentrate, to support the company’s growth for exports to Europe and North America.

Taarab music was at the heart of celebrations in Zanzibar, the latest stop of the Bienal de São Paulo’s global tour. The 36th edition of the second-oldest art biennial in the world after Venice is touring different parts of the world to explore its central theme of humanity, arriving in the Tanzanian archipelago after earlier trips to Marrakech and Guadeloupe. “Improvisation, a fundamental part of Taarab music, offers a profound metaphor for human adaptability and interconnectedness,” said organizers, taking inspiration from Zanzibar itself as a “point of intersection of multiple cultures, philosophies, sciences.”

US President Donald Trump’s rapid-fire approach – encompassing everything from a flurry of executive orders to an aggressive Elon Musk-led effort to downsize the federal government – is quickly becoming the defining feature of his second term, write Shelby Talcott and Burgess Everett.

“That is a key element of his strategy: Throw it at the wall, some of it sticks, some of it doesn’t,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., told Semafor. “One way or the other it’s distracting. And it’s infuriating.”

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— Alexis Akwagyiram, Preeti Jha, Alexander Onukwue, and Yinka Adegoke.