Foreign Aid — News & Analysis

As Ebola spreads in DRC, declining international aid exposes the vulnerable (August 6, 2026)

The U.S. withdrawal of humanitarian funding did more than reduce the amount of aid reaching the DRC; it dismantled pieces of the infrastructure needed to respond to the Ebola outbreak.

• Action Against Hunger (ACF) lost U.S. funding that had represented about 70% of its DRC programs. It consequently closed programs and laid off roughly 100 employees. One earlier closure in western DRC left 200 severely malnourished children without the assistance they had been receiving.
• The World Food Programme, previously dependent on the U.S. for about 60% of its DRC funding, had to reduce food distributions. In 2025 it reached about 1 million people, versus the 2.3 million it had originally intended to serve.
• The consequences are particularly stark among people displaced by fighting. At Plaine Savo, more than 50,000 people arrived after renewed fighting; by June the camp population was about 76,000. Twenty-six people died of hunger between December 2025 and June 2026, according to camp management.
• Sanitation deteriorated badly. A third of Plaine Savo's latrines were out of service, while another camp had a deficit of 589 latrines. Since Ebola spreads through bodily fluids, including feces and urine, the sanitation failures directly increased the danger of transmission. At least three displaced people died of Ebola in the latter camp.
• Perhaps most important for establishing a connection to the U.S. aid cuts: humanitarian workers told Le Monde that disease-surveillance programs had been terminated in 2025, meaning they could have detected the Ebola outbreak earlier. The virus apparently began circulating in February, but the Congolese government didn't officially declare the outbreak until May 15.

By July 31, the DRC government counted 3,532 confirmed Ebola cases and 1,556 deaths.

While the the U.S. announced another $242 million for the Ebola response, bringing total U.S. assistance for the outbreak above $500 million, the dismantling of U.S. foreign aid weakened food, health, sanitation and disease-surveillance systems in the DRC; the weakening of those systems was central to aggravating the Ebola crisis.