Mary Johnson: Interview notes for International Listening Session

EDITOR'S NOTE: The views and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not of Ottawa News Network.

In September, I had the privilege of speaking with an acquaintance who is a former aid worker for Catholic Relief Services (CRS) in the Central African Republic (CAR). I will call this person Ann. She was laid off from CRS shortly after the shutdown of USAID in January 2025, and I wanted to learn about the ramifications of the shuttering of USAID and the accompanying halt to most of our nation’s international humanitarian assistance. Here is what I learned from that discussion.

The U.S. is the primary provider of foreign humanitarian assistance to the CAR. Though U.S. aid to the CAR was eliminated in January, it was reinstated a couple of months later. The work that the CRS team performed was primarily directed toward building resilience, as opposed to delivering emergency assistance. Thus, the halt to US aid did not cause deaths in the CAR, but it did induce confusion and disruption of valuable programs.

Five examples follow:

First, when the January 2025 aid cuts were imposed, no one had any idea if or when any of the assistance would be resumed. This left NGO’s such as CRS rushing to find alternative sources of funding. After the U.S., the next largest source of international assistance is Europe, but the capacity of Europe is far lower than that of the U.S.

So, the January 2025 aid cuts led to massive layoffs among many NGO’s. Once staff are laid off, those workers cannot wait around to see if their jobs might eventually come back. Thus, the laid-off staff scrambled to get new jobs and were generally not available to resume their aid work when the assistance resumed.

Second, one form of CRS assistance in the CAR is food aid that supplements the modest diets of the people. The suspension of aid caused perishable food to spoil instead of being delivered to the intended recipients. 

Third, the pause in assistance occurred during the planting season. Aid workers had been teaching farmers techniques to improve their crops and would normally visit the farmers once a month to ensure that they were properly implementing the techniques they had been taught. The pause meant that the aid workers were unable to check in with the farmers during this critical season.

Fourth, another program that was disrupted was the creation and support of savings-and-loan communities, in which participants pool their savings and use those savings to make loans to each other. Aid workers would normally accompany these groups to ensure that they were operating properly. During the pause, the aid workers were unable to provide such oversight.

Finally, the suspension of aid interrupted the work of INSO (International NGO Safety Organization), which provides safety services to NGOs working in insecure and conflict-affected countries. INSO informs humanitarian workers of areas that are unsafe to work in, so that the workers can avoid undue risk. Thus, during the suspension of US funding, aid workers were less safe because they did not have the services of INSO. Thankfully, CRS also obtains safety intelligence from the Catholic church, which is widely present around the world, but that information cannot fully substitute for the information provided by INSO.

According to Ann, the disruptions and elimination of international aid may have a silver lining. Some aid programs are poorly designed in the sense that they foster dependence rather than progress toward self-sufficiency. So, while the sudden, wholesale elimination of aid was unjustified and cruel, perhaps the disruption will stimulate reforms whereby assistance programs will include strategies for helping aid beneficiaries shift from dependence to self-reliance. 

Ann mentioned that another practice ripe for reform is the delivery of food aid by shipping U.S. commodities to regions in need rather than sourcing food from nearby areas. This practice harms the nearby economies by undermining their markets. Shipments of U.S. food are also slow, expensive, and sometimes consist of culturally inappropriate foods. Shipping U.S. food does benefit U.S. farmers, but that should not be a priority of our nation’s assistance programs.

To conclude, our nation must recognize our responsibility to reliably help others in need — whether at home or abroad — without putting narrow self-interest first. We also need to avoid a savior mentality that ignores the potential contributions of others. 

Instead, we must acknowledge that fostering self-sufficiency and supporting foreign markets is a means of upholding human dignity. Work is not just a means of supporting oneself. It is a means of exercising agency and contributing to society. Let’s design our international assistance programs to be reliable, helpful, and respectful.

— Mary Johnson is a resident of Holland. Learn more about Bread for the World at bread.org.

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