In the wake of the exit of USAID, some African countries in have kicked against the move by President Donald Trump’s administration to roll out a new “America First” global health strategy that sees the future of foreign
assistance, granting money in return for data, which already generated $20.6 billion into the US economy since December in signed Memorandum of Understanding (MOUs) with more than 30 nations.
Contrarily, Nigeria is however one of the few countries in the Africa that have already signed MOUs with Washington (US) worth $5 billion in exchange for data and specimens as specified by the Trump’s administration.
According to the Financial Times of London, some African officials have also accused the US of predicating aid money on other demands, including preferential access to critical minerals, though Washington has categorically denied this.
In an article published in the UK’s Financial Times, monitored by Sunday Telegraph Correspondent, several African countries, including Ghana, Zambia and Zimbabwe, have publicly rejected the deals, saying they violate patient privacy and national sovereignty.
In memorandums of understanding (MOUs) signed with more than 30 nations since December, worth $20.6billion, governments have accepted five years of funding often much reduced from previous levels in return for a pledge to provide up to 25 years of patient data and, in some cases, pathogenic specimens, along with a commitment to co-invest.
Recipient countries have promised to stump up $7.8 billion, about a third of the total, and the US can withdraw funding if it determines nations are not meeting their co-investment pledges.
Critics have likened these transactional agreements to a form of digital and genomic colonialism, warning that data could be made available to unnamed private US corporations, including pharmaceutical companies and big data analytics groups.
A Nigerian ministerial health envoy and co-chair of the African Vaccine Delivery Alliance, Ayoade Alakija, said: “It’s a recolonisation of our health system,” citing the $5 billion MOU Nigeria signed with Washington in December. “They can create vaccines and diagnostic tools with our data and we get scraps off the table.”
The US, which quit the World Health Organization in January, stated that it needs data and specimens it no longer receives through the multilateral system to protect itself against future pandemics.
Washington has said it cannot grant benefits that come from any data such as access to medicines developed from pathogen samples to origin countries because that would contravene companies’ intellectual property rights, a position it says is shared with other OECD nations.
“In a suspected outbreak, one of the first phone calls most countries make is to the US CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention),” a senior State Department official said. “We want to continue to be partners of choice.
We’re saying to countries that if you find you have a pathogen on your hands and you’re not sure what it is, send it to us and we’ll help you figure out what it is.”
One senior Nigerian health official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: “My first thought is we are not going to give the US 25 years of data in return for five years of money.
That’s not going to happen.” Washington says, in many cases, countries have successfully negotiated down the 25-year period.
In his reaction to the US foreign assistance: granting money in return for data, Nigeria’s Health Minister, Muhammad Ali Pate, said: “Any data sharing will have to conform with Nigerian laws and policies’.”
Pate said Nigeria’s deal with Washington, which requires Nigeria to contribute $3 billon of the $5 billion over five years, was a nonbinding MOU. “Any data sharing will have to conform with Nigerian laws and policies [and] either party can withdraw,” Pate noted.
The agreement marked what he called a “definitive end to US aid dependency by 2030”. But health experts warned that Washington was pushing for implementation too quickly to deal with such complex issues.
“America is giving countries very little time,” Serah Makka, executive director for Africa explained at the One Campaign, which advocates for an end to extreme poverty and preventable diseases.
“Even the American government doesn’t work that fast.” The new-style MOUs signed with governments in Africa, Latin America and Asia are focused on HIV, tuberculosis, malaria and maternal health.
They are designed to replace roughly $44 billion of funding from USAID, which was abolished by the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) last year.
The process is being driven by Brad Smith, a former Doge official, who is now a global health adviser to the US State Department.
Cuts to US funding over the next five years range from 12 per cent in the case of Ethiopia to 71 per cent for Rwanda, according to KFF, a non-profit specialising in health policy research.
