No institution outside North America receives more grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) than the University of Cape Town. The vice-chancellor of Africa’s premier research university, Mosa Moshabela, recently told a that 155 projects, with a total value of 2.5 billion rand (?100 million), are supported by US funding, mostly linked to HIV or tuberculosis research. More than 140 of those are funded by the NIH.
That translates into 475 academic and research support posts being dependent, in whole or in part, on US assistance, with a further 61 postgraduate students and 20 postdoctoral research fellows also relying on American investment.
All of that is under threat as the NIH ending all grants to South Africa – in response to an executive order from President Trump on 7 February that claimed that the country was discriminating against Afrikaners: white South Africans of Dutch descent.
About 70 per cent of South Africa’s total medical research – – was funded by the NIH, and an NIH memo leaked at the end of March revealed that future grants to the country are on hold until further notice. The potential consequences for South African science would, needless to say, be devastating.
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“There are currently no mechanisms to retain over 200…staff members through other, non-NIH funds,” warned Moshabela in a report discussed at the 15 March council meeting. The loss of researchers behind UCT’s “most impactful research programmes” would almost inevitably lead to a fall in publications, which he feared would have a “profound impact on the university’s ranking and financial sustainability”.
Even if Cape Town avoids the termination of all its NIH grants, moreover, it seems unlikely that non-US universities will be able to count on Donald Trump’s America for research funding in the same way as previously. That point was very much underlined by the of more than 5,200 USAID contracts – some 83 per cent of all USAID commitments – some of which support research alongside international development aid.
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USAID previously awarded universities about , according to the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. And a detailing just over $75 billion in cuts includes an array of cancelled payments to universities, from $424 million promised to Johns Hopkins University to a $1,308 grant to a Guatemalan university.
That retreat from the US’ often unheralded role in global research has left many wondering what comes next. Can anyone or anything step into the breach? Will a new ecosystem of global collaboration on research emerge? How much of the potential damage to global research can be avoided?
“You could always try to imagine that something will emerge from the ashes, but it’s difficult to see any silver linings,” reflected Kevin Marsh, co-director of the Oxford Africa Initiative, contemplating the “disaster for research” caused by the USAID cuts.
“In Kenya, about 40,000 people were out of work almost overnight – it was so indiscriminate,” said Marsh. And though most of them were not officially classified as research staff, their work in administering vaccines, collecting data and similar activities was crucial for Marsh’s work on malaria and other tropical diseases. “It’s hard to separate people into different columns in this kind of environment – health research in Africa needs a lot of implementation, so you need these people on the ground to deliver research,” he said.
The likelihood of any other funder stepping up to plug such a huge gap seems remote. Many Western governments are feeling the squeeze, not least due to concerns over Trump’s tariffs and his questionable commitment to Western defensive alliances. The UK government, for instance, recently cut its own overseas aid commitments from 0.5 per cent to 0.3 per cent of GDP by 2027?because of the perceived need to increase defence spending. That represents a 40 per cent cut, which will reduce aid spending from about ?13 billion to an estimated ?9.2 billion. And only a fraction of this sum goes on research: the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology’s aid-funded portfolio was in 2023, a recent audit found.
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Neither can charity conceivably step into the breach: the Wellcome Trust’s chief executive, John-Arne R?ttingen, noted in February that the ?1.1 billion spent annually by his organisation was a “” compared with the US’ (?55 billion) annual spending on overseas development aid, while the Gates Foundation has also said no charity could replace the US government’s contribution.
At Cape Town, the split between US federal and philanthropic support is instructive: the NIH funding of 660 million rand (?27 million) pledged for 2025 is 50 per cent more than the still impressive 448 million rand the university received last year from philanthropists.
At the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), another leading South African university, the loss of US funding has necessitated severe cuts of research personnel and PhD funding, says Thesla Palanee-Phillips, director of clinical trials and lab director at the Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Institute. She described the situation as a “bloodbath”, pushing all research groups into “survival mode”, with “grant-writing prioritised over paper-writing” in a race to find replacement funds to prevent projects being shelved and research groups breaking up.
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“With loss of funding, we are also seeing postgraduate researchers being left without support to complete academic degrees,” said Palanee-Phillips, adding that concerns are rising in South Africa that there will be an “exodus of talent and supervisors of postgrads to greener pastures in other countries or continents”.
For many in the UK, the USAID cuts have a troubling similarity to 2021’s sudden decimation of the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), an ODA-funded programme that supported research (much of it UK-led) addressing challenges faced by developing countries. The government’s decision to reduce from 0.7 to 0.5 per cent the proportion of British GDP spent on ODA because of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on public finances resulted in a ?300 million in-year shortfall in the GCRF (70 per cent of its budget), including an in-year hole of about ?120 million.
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That proportion was originally supposed to return to the 0.7 per cent that had been by prime minister David Cameron, but its further fall to 0.3 per cent suggests that the GCRF – which was worth ?1.5 billion over five years – is not coming back any time soon.
“Some UK researchers will know what US researchers in the field are dealing with – at some level, you do feel responsible when people’s livelihoods are destroyed,” said Alison Phipps, Unesco chair in refugee integration through languages and the arts at the University of Glasgow, whose GCRF project was hit hard by the UK cuts and who publicly quit as an adviser to the Arts and Humanities Research Council over the handling of what she called, in a co-authored open letter, the UK’s “draconian and misguided” cuts to overseas research projects.
“Some US researchers might want to fight the cuts legally or campaign against what’s happened given that it’s been so chaotic. But many will just want to give up [on cross-border research], saying ‘never again’,” she predicted.
Nevertheless, Phipps hopes international collaboration continues “on a voluntary basis” via more informal, “almost anarchic” structures. “Arts and humanities have long worked with almost no resources, so we’ve shown you can keep things going with things like Zoom meetings,” she said.
“That doesn’t help the people who were previously employed, but research institutions [in the Global South] are resilient, [adept at] coping with economic devastation to carry on with relatively little.”
With many of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals already by the target date of 2030, could the NIH and USAID cuts be a further nail in their coffin?
According to a University of Sussex in 2023, the US accounted for roughly a quarter of papers related to SDGs between 2015 and 2019. But the concentration of US research focused on SDGs is “” compared with other high-income countries, explained the report’s lead author, Tommaso Ciarli, principal research fellow at Sussex’s Science Policy Research Unit.
And while “we will certainly miss the research funded by the NIH – it’s a huge part of global research”, it is also true that its funding “has not always been aligned with SDGs”, Ciarli said. “Much of it is concentrated on cancer research because this is where scientists want to publish given the incentives related to funding and publications. For India or another low- or middle-income country, research on cancer is important, but if you consider which diseases are having an impact, it’s not the major [one].”
If countries with a greater focus on SDG-related research could be persuaded to increase their funding, its overall global volume could increase despite the US’ withdrawal of aid, speculated Ciarli. The problem is that the “anti-woke” agenda – which Trump has turbocharged and which has led to the cancellation of numerous domestic grants on topics such as EDI and climate change – is also pushing other countries to spend less on research related to the SDGs. “Unless there is a backlash from universities, it is difficult to see this changing,” he said.
For that reason, Ciarli agreed that it is “unrealistic” for any of UN’s goals to be achieved by 2030. “The UN will come up with a sequel – perhaps different goals and missions, or focusing on SDGs in a way that works better,” he speculated.
But, whatever the financial and cultural headwinds, researchers must not give up, says Wits’ Palanee-Phillips. For instance, halting undergoing clinical trials of HIV treatments will mean “more people with HIV”, while fewer doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers will undermine South Africa’s pipeline of future research leaders.
A “loss of momentum” in research would also endanger Wits’ “flagship status”, which paved the way for its high-level international research collaborations.
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“We need to act fast to save what we can, so we have enough to move forward,” Palanee-Phillips said. “It’s stressful, but if we break momentum, it will see us take many steps backwards in all our research efforts.”
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