Malawi: Malawi's Education Choices in the Wake of Aid Cuts

Over a year has passed since the Donald Trump administration dismantled USAID, cutting more than 5,000 programmes and slashing US$40 billion in funding worldwide.

The cuts have reduced access to HIV treatment, driven up severe malnutrition among children, and resulted in an estimated 700,000 lives lost. Medication and infrastructure to treat diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and pneumonia were withdrawn.

In education, USAID's closure has created an "unprecedented crisis", according to a report by the European Training Foundation, an EU agency.

Aid austerity is not limited to the US. In 2025, overall official development assistance dropped by 23%, marking what the OECD described as a "historic decline in foreign aid". Cuts came from the US, Germany, the UK, France, Canada and Japan.

As a transnational team of education scholars, we take a critical approach to development aid. While we recognise that aid can improve and even save lives, it is not an inherent good. It can reproduce inequities.

We have spent decades studying educational interventions in Malawi and have documented how, even while aid has delivered benefits to individuals, its structures sideline local organisations, serve the interests of donor countries, and mimic colonial relations.

For these reasons, we've been thinking about whether USAID's closure, while painful and damaging, might give rise to a new arrangement beyond aid.

Malawi is an ideal setting to explore this moment of change. The US alone contributed 13% of the country's overall budget and provided one-quarter of education development spending. Interested in how Malawians make sense of aid austerity and imagine alternatives, we are launching a three-year (2026-2029) qualitative study of post-USAID possibilities in Malawi's education sector. We are asking civil servants, NGO workers and aid workers how they see the future of education amid aid austerity.

To prepare for the project, we conducted a pilot study of the immediate aftermath of USAID's closure, from January to June 2025, with first-round follow-up interviews in May 2026. The 20 education experts we spoke to held very mixed opinions on the post-USAID landscape. Some saw potential to redress power imbalances; others emphasised the obstacles to self-resourcing. We pause now to reflect on these themes.

Prior to the cuts, Malawi was saturated with international development - one informant called it "a development playground". From 2019 to 2023, foreign governments contributed 80% of funding to Malawi's education capital projects (school and classroom construction p