A Quarter of Young Africans Think Killing USAID Might Actually Help

What the Survey Actually Says

The African Youth Survey, which interviewed almost 5,000 people aged 18 to 24 across 16 African countries, found that 25% of young Africans believe the US aid cuts could have a positive impact. The reasoning, broadly: losing foreign money will force African governments to stop outsourcing accountability and start solving their own problems.

The optimism isn't evenly spread. According to the Guardian, it peaks in Ghana and Nigeria, where 41% and 40% of young people respectively see potential upside. Liberia clocks in at 37%. Meanwhile, 46% of African youth overall still believe the USAID shutdown will be damaging, with Mozambique registering the sharpest anxiety at 76%, followed by Kenya and Rwanda at 63% each. Healthcare and disease prevention top the list of concerns.

So this is not a continent of young people cheering the Trump administration. It is a continent of young people holding two contradictory truths at once, something American political discourse has largely lost the ability to do.

The USAID Gutting, Refreshed in Case You Forgot

Early 2025: the Trump administration announced it was eliminating more than 90% of USAID's foreign contracts and slashing $60 billion in total US assistance worldwide. That is not a budget trim. That is a controlled demolition of the global aid architecture the United States spent decades building.

The consequences were immediate and brutal. As the Guardian reports, the cuts caused the closure of maternity clinics, triggered medicine shortages, and gutted organizations doing humanitarian work at a moment when the UN is already scrambling for funding and climate-driven food insecurity is getting worse. These are not abstract policy outcomes. These are real people who stopped getting healthcare.

And the US wasn't alone in swinging the axe. Britain cut its aid budget from 0.5% of gross national income to 0.3%, its lowest share on record, according to the Guardian. The UN target is 0.7%. France and Germany have been cutting too. The entire western aid ecosystem is contracting simultaneously, which makes the question of what fills the gap considerably more urgent than any single survey question.

Why Smart People Can See Both Sides of This

Degan Ali, executive director of Adeso, an African nonprofit working to reduce aid dependency, told the Guardian that while the cuts were carried out in a "hugely irresponsible and inhumane" manner, she was not surprised that young people found something positive in them. "A lot of people find aid very demeaning," she said. "There is a sense of 'We can do this for ourselves.'" That is a real and legitimate grievance, not a propaganda line.

The critique isn't that aid is useless. It's that decades of aid flows haven't translated into visible improvement for most people, and the money has often reinforced the power of governments and NGO bureaucracies over ordinary communities. Ali put it plainly: "There's all this money going into the development sector, but they're not really seeing major changes on the ground."

Hibak Kalfan, executive director of Near, a civil society network from the Global South, framed it as an opportunity, telling the Guardian that the USAID collapse has "put a real light on the fact that organizations have been highly dependent on bilateral external funding for years." The crisis, in other words, is also a reckoning. That doesn't make the human cost of the shutdown acceptable. But it does mean the conversation is more complicated than American political tribalism tends to allow.

The Traoré Factor

Here's the part of this story that deserves more attention than it's getting. Ali also told the Guardian that young Africans are increasingly looking to pan-Africanist leaders as role models, citing Ibrahim Traoré, the military leader of Burkina Faso, as the standout example. Traoré has built a continent-wide following by positioning himself as someone throwing off western influence and governing for his own people. There are minibus taxis in Nairobi with his name on them.

Burkina Faso under Traoré is, by measurable metrics, a very poor and increasingly unstable country. The Sahel security situation is a catastrophe. But Traoré's symbolic appeal is operating independently of those facts, because the hunger for leaders who seem to prioritize their own citizens over foreign approval is genuinely powerful. When decades of foreign aid haven't visibly moved the needle, a strongman who says "we don't need you" finds a receptive audience.

Ivor Ichikowitz, whose South African family foundation commissioned the report, summed it up to the Guardian: "The youth is concerned about governments that are overly influenced by foreign powers. What they're saying is that African governments need to take agency and responsibility for their own reality." That sentiment doesn't go away just because the Trump administration is the one accidentally surfacing it.

The Demographics Are the Story

One more number worth sitting with: Africa has the youngest population on Earth. According to the UN, 70% of sub-Saharan Africa is under 30. The median age of the continent is 19 years and six months. By 2030, Africa will be home to more than 40% of the world's youth.

These are not peripheral opinions from a minor demographic. This survey is capturing the political instincts of the generation that will determine what Africa looks like for the rest of the 21st century. When roughly a quarter of them see a silver lining in the collapse of the western aid model, that is a signal worth understanding rather than dismissing.