More than a quarter-million aid workers lost their jobs as a result of the U.S. foreign aid cuts, many of them impoverished locals whose lives have been destroyed as a result.
In Nepal, which lost 100% of its funding related to LGBTQ+, hundreds of aid workers who performed HIV outreach with the LGBTQ+ community—including sex workers—were among those who lost their jobs. Now, many of them have been forced to turn to sex work themselves to survive, working alongside the very people they once helped.
With the USAID cuts also eliminating much of the community’s access to free contraception and PrEP (a prescription drug to prevent HIV infection), the risk of HIV has skyrocketed as the ranks of sex workers having unprotected sex has swelled. In this reporting project, The Associated Press takes us inside the lives of the former aid workers who are now risking everything by working in the sex industry to survive.
In another part of Nepal, along the India border, the AP explores the fallout of the cancellation of a USAID-funded program that provided reproductive health services to adolescents. Like in many remote, impoverished regions of the world, the cuts to maternal and child health programs have resulted in women and babies dying quiet, painful—and often invisible—deaths.
Here, the AP tells the stories of the mothers and infants who have died due to the disruption in reproductive services, and explains why these deaths often go unrecorded.
