彭博调查：美国国际开发署削减致肯尼亚灌溉项目荒废

Everything has dried. We are suffering a lot because there's no plants, no food, everything has just dried. This is a banana. It's drying. It's about to fall down. You see, it's very weak because the roots have already rotten. You can see a lot of water. We can't harvest anything. There's no any fruit, any crop. We are suffering financially. USAID - run by radical lunatics and we're getting them out. Foreign aid is not charity.

It is designed to further the national interest of the United States. Cuts to USAID might cost millions of lives. It's false. The Trump administration say that USAID was wasteful, inefficient, and politically misaligned with American interests. We canceled a bunch of contracts in USAID. Some were stupid and outrageous. Others didn't serve the national interest. Marco Rubio and his team promised that they will review every single program that they were canceling.

Well, from our interviews with former staffers, there was no meaningful review process. Is it true that we are leaving certain countries because they don't align with our strategic interest? Absolutely. That's how diplomacy has been done for thousands of years. That's not cruelty. What's happening right now is dangerous for the United States and humanity. These are people shutting down an agency and having no clue the work that is being done.

Budget for USAID was 0.6 to 0.7% of our budget every year. That is such a small amount of money and the predictions of how many people will die as a result is in the tens of millions. Our investigation shows what happened when you abandon infrastructure projects. One year later, people are still living with the consequences. I have always been intrigued about what happens when you leave from unfinished infrastructure around the world without surveillance, without any safety measure put in place.

When USAID was dismantled, I had this idea. Can we actually track what is happening on the ground? The tools we're using in this investigation include satellite imagery, mapping, data analysis. We've reviewed over 100 internal documents and all [it] together has helped us to understand the impact. We also review multiple warnings from former USAID people about how dangerous and risky it was to leave those projects that were not complete.

I think if you were to ask people who worked with me or my husband, they would say that work is thing I pride myself most on. It's the place I feel safest. When I walk into the office and the doors close behind me, I exhale because I know that my work has meaning and I've been working in that space for 20 years. I worked for USAID from 2012 to 2025. My exit from USAID was not voluntary. Very shortly after the inauguration in January 2025, we heard that there would be a review that would last roughly six months of all USAID projects.

Our leadership team got together and basically created a dashboard of projects and you know, said green, yellow, red. If we have to sacrifice projects that don't align as well, these are the ones we'll sacrifice. We certainly didn't approach it as a, we're going to save everything. We were willing to make concessions. We prepared to defend them. And then all projects in the office that I worked in were canceled, including all WASH projects.

So we decided to look at WASH, the area of water sanitation and hygiene, because very often this area is overlooked. It's not a very sexy area of the funding environment. And yet it's so important for delivering basics like water to communities, helping children under five have sanitary conditions and to avoid waterborne diseases, some of which are often silent killers in a in a country like Kenya. The Kamlenza Irrigation Scheme, you can see right here in this white boundary, this was designed to move water across these set of fields here.

When USAID came in to essentially rebuild that scheme, rebuild the distribution points so that farmers would have better access to water, [So] they'd be able to have more productive banana crop. So when the stop work orders came in, there was this whole top section of the canal leading up to the village here where a lot of it had been dug up and there had been vegetation cleared around the edge of the canal. So you can see all these side canals where water flows that we mapped out, and there are distribution points along this canal in order to be able to move water in both of these directions.

Whenever water is coming in from the top of the canal, it can't be controlled, so it just floods all the fields surrounding them. [When] the project initially started, we had a great hope, but unfortunately when the aid was terminated, we faced a lot of problems because the work was not complete. You can see down there I've dug some drains so that water can move down. But unfortunately, because everywhere the water is very logged, you can see [it's] very wet.

The crop can't grow anymore, unless this canal is made so that this water can move and the land can dry. We Kenyan farmers had a very great hope with America and we are pleading to them to complete this project so that we can get food. We can get financially stable. They had only needed around $217,000 to complete, which in the grand scheme of the USAID's budget was not very much. When the order to stop work came in, that site was abandoned as it was clear.

It would've been more efficient and more beneficial to have these projects completed, but nothing happened despite countless efforts to send the message to the authorities in Washington. So when USAID stopped their work in Kenya, there was a total of 26 projects in the WASH space ongoing and it only would cost around $2 million to actually finish them. A key pattern that we found is that when the stop work order was issued, most of them were already happening.

They were not in the design phase or the evaluating phase. So we saw materials that were abandoned on the sites, infrastructure that was halfway done. The Trump administration justified cancelling those programs to save money and make those investments more efficient. But [what] we have seen on the ground is lot of waste. I would say that there has definitely been wastage of funding due to the cancellation of the projects.

It's a really hard number to calculate because there was not a real tally, but I think it's very safe to say that between salaries that had been paid or infrastructure that had been abandoned, that's a significant loss. The claim we were investigating was whether the flooding that happened in the village of Kimorigo this year was directly linked to the unfinished infrastructure project along this irrigation scheme. We knew it flooded a lot this year from this satellite imagery here, from when the reporters were there.

So that's where we turned to the radar data, which is showing these dark areas, which is accumulated standing water over this particular rainy season compared to other years. So if you plot the flood intensity index against the cumulative rainfall across this rainy season, 2026 stands out. If you calculate the intensity of rainfall based on a seven day average and you look at a bunch of other statistics, 2026 is not unusual in the amount of rain that it had, yet it is very unusual in terms of the severity of the flooding that happened in this particular village.

And the spatial patterns of that show that the western side of Kimorigo, which is near the irrigation scheme, is the area that has, that is different from every other year. It's now a much worse functioning system than it used to be. So the promise has been totally shattered. When nothing is put in its place, it can actually have the totally unintended consequence of making things way worse than they actually even used to be.

The impacts have been severe and what we learned was that there were cases of diarrhea that had kind of exploded in the area particularly with kids What we find when we engage with countries around the world is that the soft power narrativ

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