In April 2025, the United States government began cutting foreign assistance funding at a scale not seen since the end of the Cold War. The secondary effects landed across the East African NGO ecosystem with the specificity of a surgical cut on a body that did not know it was dependent on that particular artery.
The number from colleagues in the sector: between 40,000 and 80,000 jobs in Kenya’s civil society directly or indirectly funded through US assistance programmes. The range reflects the difficulty of measuring informal employment — the drivers, the caterers, the field staff whose contracts flow through local implementing partners whose budgets flow through USAID prime contractors.
The Data That Was Being Collected
What is less discussed than the jobs is the data. NGOs were running the most comprehensive ground-level data collection operations on the continent. Nutrition surveys in Turkana. Water access monitoring in Marsabit. Maternal health tracking in Homa Bay. This data was operational — used to direct resources, calibrate programmes, maintain institutional knowledge about conditions that no government agency was measuring at equivalent resolution.
When an NGO closes, it takes its data with it. The spreadsheets, the field surveys, the baseline assessments, the longitudinal tracking that took five years to build — this disappears into server shutdown notices and hard drives in filing cabinets. Kenya’s data infrastructure just lost a significant layer and nobody is talking about what replaces it.
The tools in this project were built specifically because the NGO-dependent model of data collection and disaster response is fragile. The intelligence infrastructure should not require external funding to operate.
Responses