Welcome to Repro Fight Back a podcast on all things related to sexual and reproductive health rights and justice. Hey, re pros. How's everybody doing? I'm your host Jenny Wetter , and my pronouns are she her. So y'all , um, maybe just a little bit of housekeeping before we get started. I feel like it's been a little minute since I have done anything about donating.
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I'd love to know one, if you would be interested in buying merch, but two, if there are things that you would like to see designs on, just let us know. And with that, I, I actually think I'm gonna keep the intro a little short this week. I, I have some fun things happening, but I'm not quite ready to tell y'all yet.
You'll find out I think next week, but until then, it makes it a little hard for me to talk about the things that are happening. So instead of teasing y'all, I'm just gonna go cut straight to this week's episode. I'm very excited about it. We have our wonderful senior fellow Gare Patel to talk about what is happening around foreign assistance right now, particularly in humanitarian settings.
It's been a while since we talked about what was going on with U-S-A-I-D, so it felt like a really important time to catch everybody up on what is happening. So with that, let's go to my interview with gare . Hi Gare . Thank you so much for being here today.
Hey, Jenny , it's so great to be back.
I'm always excited to have you on. Um, but before we like jump into the conversation, do you wanna take a minute and introduce yourself and include your pronouns?
Sure. My name is Gare Patel. She, her pronouns. I am , um, professional in the global development gender equality, SRHR world. Um, and I have been a , a fellow with the repro fight back work for over a year now. So really excited to be here.
So excited to have you and it , we've now been , uh, under the new administration for a couple months and there's been so much happening around foreign assistance. I thought it was like a good time to like check back in and talk about where are we at? Like what is happening right now?
I mean, it changes every day , right?
No small question. Right?
So it feels like it changes every day and it , it , it gets worse and worse for, for the development in humanitarian aid sectors. But I think overall we, we have blocking of US foreign assistance funding, including for development programs, humanitarian programs, multilateral assistance, et cetera . We have dismantling of institutions, primarily U-S-A-I-D , the US Agency for International Development.
We, we have, you know, some glimmers of hope in terms of some of these decisions are still pending in the court system, but I think we're , where we are right now is we really need to reckon with, you know, what are the long-term impacts of just the, the current upheaval that we're dealing with and what does it mean for us development assistance overall for the partners that we work in, in the field and just the,
the sector given, you know, how, what an outsized role the US government plays in development and humanitarian aid.
Yeah, like one of the things I really just think about is like the breach of trust, not only between like the implementers on the ground doing the work, but then the communities they are serving who that or like had services stopped.
Absolutely. I mean it's , uh, I think the most horrific short term , or not short term , but immediate impact of these funding cuts is literally people dying. Like pe people literally losing access to their, to food services, to anti antiretroviral medication, to vaccines, to, you know, things, things that keep them alive and healthy and and safe are, are being pulled back with zero notice.
And so there was no ability to, to plan ahead for something like this that has had catastrophic impact on communities and on the organizations that have have relied. And the local organizations that have relied on on US foreign assistance, you know, it's a lot of them are just imploding at this point.
And so that also has kind of the , a longer term impact on the community and the , the services that they were receiving. So yeah, that, that loss of trust is, is deep and a kinda a , a feeling of betrayal because just how it was rolled out. Yeah, I
Think this is one of those things that
People
Who don't work in these sectors maybe don't understand it , some of it in a way where they think, well, we can get it restarted and like everything will be fine. And like we've talked about around like the global gag rule , people think it's like a light switch, like, oh, it's in place. Oh, it's not in place.
And like all the services resume and like, everything like is restarted and everything's fine, but this is like infrastructure destruction that takes a long time to rebuild. Like people go find new jobs and you know, it , it just doesn't restart again, assuming money starts re reflowing. Yeah,
I mean that's an excellent point with, with a lot of the local partners folding right now under, under pressure and budget constraints, it's not gonna be easy to, to just open their doors again. They have to, they're losing personnel, they're losing , um, facilities and it's, it's just so needless, right?
Like they , we have, we have medications sitting in warehouses rotting because we have, we, meaning the US government has ca has canceled the contracts for their delivery. We have food aids sitting in , uh, at docks rotting because we don't have the infrastructure to get it to the last mile.
So it's, it's just such a waste and it's so ironic given that the, the supposed impetus for all of this is to scale back on government waste and, and inefficiencies. So it , it really doesn't make sense at the end of the day. So
I think one of the really important parts and why it's so great to have you on, is to talk about humanitarian and that the way that we are seeing this play out in the humanitarian space,
In the humanitarian space, it's really kind of a , a double whammy. I mean, we have the, the loss of funding for U-S-A-I-D implemented humanitarian programs, so including those that are implemented through , um, development contractors or, or international NGOs. Those are the ones that are really well developed, really, you know, well structured in place in, in the countries that really need it.
All of that is getting pulled back , um, due to the funding funding cuts. But we're also seeing a , the , the loss of funding and support for UN agencies who are also doing a lot of the kind of middle management of humanitarian assistance. So, you know, world Food Program, U-N-H-C-R , um, uh, U-N-F-P-A , all of these UN agencies play a a , a role in humanitarian system.
And the loss of US government funding to those institutions is, is really difficult.
I mean, for example, I was just reading the A-A-U-N-F-P-A report that in Afghanistan where the US government sustains 40% of the humanitarian operations, that loss is devastating to, particularly to women and girls in Afghanistan who are already dealing with a number of limitations on their rights, limitations on their mobility and, and ability to access services.
Now, the, you know, one of the last lifelines they had is female health workers that were funded by U-N-F-P-A who can get into some of the rural areas or provide the gender responsive support health services that, that Afghan women and girls need. They're no longer funded through the loss of US government funding.
And so that's gonna have massive impacts on women's health, on maternal mortality, on, on children , um, et cetera. Similarly in, in Yemen, I mean there there are nearly 1 million women who are losing access to, to reproductive health services in Ethiopia. There are nearly 200,000 people, including a number of refugees who are losing access to SRHR and GBV services.
And these are countries, I mean, Yemen is actively in the middle of a conflict and humanitarian crisis right now, and Ethiopia is still recovering from, from conflict for a number of years. And so the humanitarian needs are, are deep and the loss of really critical funding through the US government is just gonna have a , a catastrophic impact on, on those communities.
Yeah, those U-N-F-P-A numbers were shocking. I, I think it , it's really hard for people to imagine the scale of devastation that that is being caused by the loss of these programs. Like I said, UFPA has to , had some really great numbers they put out, we'll make sure to include that in the show notes.
There was that great piece by Nick Christophe that was trying to outline like what the loss of the assistances and like possible lives lost and again mm-hmm . The scale was unreal.
Absolutely. And this is not verified, but I I was reading a resource earlier today where it , it was something like a hundred people a day are dying because of the loss of food aid, which is just unimaginably cruel, but it's just, it it goes against our, our values as a country, but also goes against logic and reason.
Like how , how is it that we're, we've invested so much time and energy and infrastructure into providing food, food aid and we're just stopping it on, on a whim and letting people die. It , it's quite devastating.
And if that part doesn't move you, and it should be more than enough, a lot of that food aid is coming from US farmers. It is coming from exactly the high energy peanut stuff. It's , it's coming from US companies. It's money in our economy that is being lost just important in , in multiple ways.
And it , it really goes to show how foreign assistance has always been a low hanging fruit for fiscal conservatives who, who are like the , you know, why, why are we spending all of this money overseas? We have needs at home. Foreign aid is less than 1% of the US government budget. And a big portion of that actually as you said, supports us businesses and US agriculture and , and, and farmers.
So it , it , you know, we're kind of, we're kind of , uh, what's the term? We're , we're
Shooting ourselves in our own foot.
Yes, there you go. I was gonna say, you know, cutting off our nose, spite our face, but , there
We go,
Shooting ourselves in the foot. It works too. It's, it, it doesn't , uh, it doesn't line up. And
It's like one of those things that has been immovable where you have the public overwhelmingly saying that they think we spend too much on foreign assistance. They think it's 25% of the budget, and like, that number has been that number since I started working in this field. No . And, and then they're like, it should only be 10%. And like, like you said, it's less, less than 1%. Right?
Like great, could you imagine the things we can do with 10%?
Absolutely. And the funding cuts are huge. Like the , a huge as , and that's a , it's a , a massive problem, massive setback. I think what we haven't been talking about enough is the setbacks in terms of policy. There's a whole cadre of, of development professionals who have worked for decades to integrate gender into development and humanitarian policy.
And really based on evidence, based on understanding how global development works. It , it , it really does require having a gender lens to make sure that we're, we're being as effective and as efficient and as inclusive as possible.
And what we're seeing now is not just a clawback of funding, but also just a really concerted effort to pull back rights, to pull away from even terminology related to gender, to anything that smacks of inclusion. For some reason that's a, that's a a bad word, but it's almost a tenet of how good development has to happen.
We have to, to be inclusive, we have to look at the, those who are most likely to be left behind. And so I , I think what I would love to see more emphasis on is just the idea that we don't need to reinvent this wheel. We, we don't need to to scale back on gender and then put it back in 10 years later when, when we have a friendlier administration.
If the idea is to have efficient and effective development and humanitarian as assistance programs, we need to be doing that now. We need to be accounting for all sectors of society.
Yeah. That is something that has absolutely been on my mind as thinking through, like you're hearing all of these conversations about well great, we can, we can build something better. And all I can think about is that better is going to mean we're building something less without anything controversial in it.
And all of the things that we talk about, gender repro, all of that is gonna be left on the cutting room floor and like nobody is going to be standing up for us in the same way that we're trying to stand up for all of making sure that we keep global foreign assistance around. I I , I really do worry about that. And yeah .
You know how that is gonna set back gender and sexual and reproductive health for decades to come. We, you know, there was that, again, losing track of time and when things happen , but I think it was last year there was like a UN women report that if we stay on the same track we are right now, we won't get gender equality for, what was it , 300 years? Mm-hmm . Like that is already devastating.
And that was before we had all of these cuts. Like I can't imagine what this is going to do to that.
Yeah. I mean, pre covid it was 237 years Yeah. To , to achieve gender equality post covid . And we, we all know, and we've all talked about how much of a setback covid itself was on gender equality, but to add the funding cuts to that, the destructive factor here, it's more than two generations at this point.
Three generations I guess for maybe depending on, on how you're counting it, which is, I mean, we could , we could get philosophical here, but women and girls and all others have been waiting so long we've, they , we've been waiting since the beginning of time, honestly to, to have our rights.
Um, and so to have a powerful country and a powerful government like the United States stand up and say, your rights are not actually your rights is a blow. Yeah. And I , I think we, we do have to grapple with that and we do have to talk about it and name it and not get bogged down in the , the technicalities of just the funding.
It's this, these, as we're talking about the funding, all of this stuff with the, with the actual policy and, and kind of lens of gender in a more expansive definition and, and inclusion and diversity is all kind of backsliding.
And I think this is one of those areas where those of us who work in global sexual and reproductive health are more familiar with having to have that debate, right? We've had years where they're like, okay, well we'll keep global gag rule, but give you more money. And it's like more gagged money is not helpful. We need people to be able to access the care they need.
So being able to like weigh those two things and know that if you are restricting the programs and who is getting access to those programs or cutting back on gender more money isn't going to make as much progress as if you have good policies behind that money.
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I was thinking back on, on an example, we, we used back when we were advocating a lot on women's economic empowerment, the fir this was during the first Trump administration and there was so much emphasis from, from the administration on like pure women's economic empowerment issues like financial inclusion and banking and uh, and so forth.
And us from the advocacy community are like, yes, we do need that, but we also need to look at women and girls and people of , of other genders in a broader sense. We know that lack of access to contraceptives has a direct impact on women's ability to earn and that has a direct impact on their daughter's ability to go to school and therefore their ability to earn later.
So we, we have to keep connecting those dots and we, I feel like we had made progress on that, right? Even with the first Trump administration, we had made progress in terms of like linking those two issues as, you know, something that we have to think about.
And we made progress on instituting the policies at U-S-A-I-D to ask those questions, like what are the, the broader issues that we need to be accounting for if we want economic empowerment? I feel like with, with so many of these policy changes that we've had just in the past two, three months, we have clawed that back to the dark ages in a lot of ways.
And, and so my point is, even the programs that we know that the Trump administration purportedly supports, those are not gonna be as effective if we're not taking into account some of these things that they don't support that's gonna set us back.
Yeah. It makes me think back to like all of these like conversations we had around like gender and like making sure we're talking about gender based violence that's inclusive and not just focusing on women and girls, but that it's more than that.
And like now we're just at the ba we're like so far back from that, it's like, why we need to talk about women, girls at all and like, why we need to invest in women and girls. Like, we're not even to the point where we can have that broader conversation because they're just trying to wipe out all of it.
Yeah. ,
Sorry, y'all we're kind of a bummer today.
Yeah, yeah, it is. Yeah . It's a, it's a tough time and I, I don't know how we bounce back. I, I wanna like inject some hope here and I, I don't know how we, how we build back, but I think at this moment we absolutely need to continue pushing back.
And I , I feel like there's, there's so much overwhelm and there's so much to react to and there's so much here that could splinter us as us, meaning like the, the gender and us , our HR community, that is the opposite of what we need to do right now. Right now we need to be linking arms and being louder than ever because there's so much at risk.
And so it's hard, it's hard to like cut through all of the, the noise and, and overwhelm of the , of the moment that we're in, but there's so much at stake.
Yeah. We need to be loud. We need to encourage our congressional champions to be loud and, and to, you know, fight back for they created U-S-A-I-D like they, they have a real say in this and they need to fight back to ensure that these programs continue to exist in the way that Congress wanted them to exist. Exactly.
Like there are some people who are doing a really good job standing up, but I feel like there's , um, they need to be louder.
Yeah. I mean I'm all for quiet conversations and inside baseball where it's gonna be effective. I mean, ask me in like a month or so, but right now , I don't, I don't feel like that is the most effective way. I feel like we, we do have to, we have to be loud, we have to have our champions, as you said, have our champions be loud.
They, they can't have these rely on these quiet conversations with their colleagues across aisle , the aisle. It's, it's people have dug in to , to their positions. And so to, to the extent that our champions have a voice, have positions of power in, in the committees that they sit on, have , um, you know, have a platform. They, they too should be linking arms and really calling out what matters.
Okay, so we talked about, you know, being loud, but what else can our audience do? Like what can we do to fight back to ensure that, one, we keep having foreign assistance, but two, that we are making sure that we are fighting for policies around gender and that we are fighting for things around sexual and reproductive health and they don't get left behind.
I mean,
Guide solve all the problems, ,
I I , I think the, the most empowering thing I feel like I've done in this moment is calling my member of Congress and amping them up .
Like, I have fantastic members of congress, I live in Maryland, they, they're very vocal on foreign policy issues, but I, they were not talking enough about the, the impact of funding cuts on actual people and communities and the im the longer term impacts on women and girls and, and on gender equality as a whole.
And so reaching out to my members of Congress and making sure that they had those talking points, that they knew that this is something that's important, you know, to, to us as a community, but also, you know, to our , our state and locality. I I think made me feel a little better. I don't know if it makes a difference in the long run, but , but I think it does.
I think, I think we are a very powerful block of, of advocates and the, the more we push as constituents, as well as advocates, I think we just gotta keep banging, banging on that door. But I also, you know, and maybe this is, no, I don't think this is defeatist.
I think this is tactical analysis of the moment that we're in, which is that we, we really have to reckon with the idea that maybe foreign assistance is not the answer to what we're trying to achieve in the world.
And maybe this is that inflection point that where we need to question should us as, as citizens, as, as people be supporting a local civil society and strengthening their ability to capture local philanthropy and build their own kind of efficiencies and processes so that they're not as reliant on the whims of the US government. And mind you, it's not even just just the US government.
We're, we're seeing cuts in the UK in, you know, changes in policy in Germany, Netherlands, et cetera. Like there's, there's so much going on right now that's, that's stacking up against us. We needed an alternative way to kind of shore up the , the resources and the work that is happening on the ground. And so I think really using this moment to rethink how , how do , how do we do this?
How do we resource services and aid and expansion of programs from other sources? I, I think we need to, to really think that through. And I think philanthropy, other donors, it's a , it's a moment for them to step up.
Yeah. And I , I would also just add, because it is so rampant is like pushing back on some of that misinformation if you hear it , uh, particularly around the, like, so much of our money is going to foreign assistance because I think when people understand how much good it does and how little of our budget it is, they're more supportive.
Um , that would be my my second kind of meta call to action, which is, you know , think, think through ways you can support local organizations who are doing this work on the ground.
It's important. It saves lives, it makes us safer. It's, it's just, it's important and
How it actually keeps America safer, right? Like the , you know, the whole, the whole mantle of America first does it, does it, you know, support our, our security, our prosperity, blah blah, blah. Like this is soft power , we , we should be investing in it.
It does keep America safer, it does build bridges and it does establish cooperation and collaboration in ways that military assistance, other forms of international relations cannot. I I think that it , it's so myopic to, to only look at it in terms of dollar figures.
Rie , thank you so much for being here. As always, it was a joy to talk to you. Thanks
So much , Jenny . You got me riled up. I'm gonna go call my my senator again. Yay. He's uh , he's on my speed dial now, . But thanks so much Jenny . Thanks for everything that you do and , um, and I hope that next time we talk we're, we're in a better place and we're celebrating we lots of wins rather than lots of threats. .
Ugh . I hope. Okay, y'all, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Gare . It was kind of a heavy conversation. Things are feeling a little bleak, but it was a good conversation. And with that, I will see everybody next week. If you have any questions, comments, or topics you would like us to cover, always feel free to shoot me an email.
You can reach me at jenny jn n [email protected] or you can find us on social media. We're at re pros. Fight back on Facebook and Twitter or re pros FB on Instagram. If you love our podcast and wanna make sure more people find it, take the time to rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. Or if you wanna make sure to support the podcast, you can also donate on our website at re pros fight back.com .
Thanks all.