Global Health Aid Cuts Threaten Crisis of the Global Health Infrastructure.

Photo by @padrinan on Pixabay.com 

Major donor nations are dealing a detrimental blow to the right to health for millions of people worldwide as they make major cuts to funding for global health aid programmes. Most of these cuts come to the WHO Global Fund, which is a fund for health aid covering programmes to fight tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS. These cuts, especially those made by the US, are however affecting other areas of global health, such as programmes targeting non-communicable diseases, reproductive healthcare provision, malnutrition and preventable diseases.

In 2025 the US set major cuts to WHO donations and dismantled the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Aid spending was reduced by more than half, from $68 billion to $32 billion. These cuts came as collateral damage of the Trump administration’s new “America First Global Health Strategy”, which ushers in a new approach to global health for the US, described as “prioritising trade over aid”. The approach was criticised for being “openly transactional” and failing to take into consideration the interests of the affected communities. These cuts were compounded by other donors following suit in 2026. The UK, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, Canada, Japan all reduced their pledges; the only major donor to not do so was Norway.

The effects of these cuts are starting to materialise. Healthcare professionals report the shutting down of clinics, inaccessibility of lifesaving medicine, job loss for health workers. The collapse of global health infrastructure has not been excluded as a plausible scenario. Some reports estimate around 830k deaths correlated with or caused by US funding discontinuation. Some researchers have formulated a statistical model based on the link between recipient countries’ received aid and their death rates between 2002 and 2021: this model forecasts that current funding cuts and reductions of development assistance could lead to 22.6 million deaths by 2030, including 5.4 million children under 5. The cuts affect not only the availability and quality of healthcare, but also monitoring and data collection in the health field, making it harder to uncover the real impact of funding reductions.

The impact of these cuts compounds the systemic marginalisation that some affected communities already experience - for instance, men having sex with men, transgender people, sex workers, people who use drugs, and people living in areas with scarce food and water security and healthcare. For some, aid-backed community-based programmes are the only lifeline, as the discrimination they face may mean that government-provided healthcare is either not available or not accessible.

Despite slashed funding, WHO managed to mobilise around 85% of the needed budget for 2026-2027 thanks to preventative measures, but it declared that the remaining budget will be hard to mobilise, and that the following years present a significant challenge. WHO and Human Rights Watch denounce a major blow to the global right to health, and call for major donors to increase their support to promote global health rather than follow in the steps of the US.

written by Alessia Milillo