As the U.S. government endeavors to trim its spending, no agency has been as pared back as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). On Feb. 26, after 30 days of what was purported to be a 90-day review, the Trump Administration announced that 90% of the international aid projects the agency was funding were going to be canceled, ending an era of outsize dominance and generosity by the U.S. in foreign aid.
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These cuts include funding for medical, nutrition, educational and democratic initiatives that were sustaining and protecting millions of people. While foreign aid represented about half a percentage of the U.S. budget, it also represented more than 40% of the world’s foreign aid. The size and speed of the cancellations have reverberated around the world, with many experts suggesting that America’s reputation as a reliable and trustworthy partner has taken a hit simply because of the abruptness of the process.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that all foreign-aid projects must make Americans safer, stronger, and more prosperous. Valerie Karr, who has been working in disability rights for two decades, understands that impulse but is aghast at the cost to the people her small business served: disabled children in impoverished countries. For the last six years, Inclusive Development Partners (IDP) has helped implement plans to get children with disabilities around the world into schools and keep them there.
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IDP was hired by other aid organizations to make sure the work they were doing included people with disabilities. In that way it was occasionally branded as a DEI project, but it was not one informed by identity. If an education program was being established, IDP helped train teachers on how to instruct disabled children. It also helped identify disabled children, who were often kept home, and provided them with the materials they needed to get to school, including wheelchairs and braille books. Now after the termination of its contracts, IDP is struggling to stave off bankruptcy.
Karr, who as well as being president of IDP is an associate professor at UMass Boston, spoke to TIME about how this will affect disabled children, what Americans got out of USAID, and what she learned in the weeks since the foreign-aid freeze was implemented.
What led you to found your organization?
I got to attend the negotiations for the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. I learned the value of the disability community having a voice and advocating for their rights at an international level. In 2018, my co-founder Anne Hayes and I realized that the task was no longer advocating for disability rights; it was, how do we achieve these rights? I’m an academic and she’s a practitioner. Academics aren’t good at practice, and development practitioners aren’t good at using evidence. So we were meeting in the middle: how do we do quality work, using the evidence base? How can we include kids with disabilities in education around the world? We had a really strong collaboration with USAID. As of Jan. 22 we had 17 programs to include children of all age ranges, from pre-primary all the way through workforce transition.
What did your work actually look like?
In northern Nigeria, we were working with the International Rescue Committee on a USAID activity called Opportunities to Learn. These kids were out of school. We know that children with disabilities are eight to 10 times more likely to be out of school than a child without a disability. We train teachers how to be inclusive and use something called Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which has been found to not only help children with disabilities learn better, but children who are malnourished, children of minority status, and children who have issues with chronic absenteeism due to child labor or having to support farming communities. In Bangladesh, we work with parents and communities on how to reduce stigma towards kids with disabilities, because kids with disabilities don’t go to school for a variety of reasons. The classroom is not accessible. But also parents are scared to send their kids because their child is more likely to be hurt or harmed if they leave the household. We work with communities and schools to ensure kids ultimately get the access they need to an education.
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What kind of disabilities are you dealing with?
USAID started more with hearing and vision and physical disabilities, because those are obvious, but over time—because we’re using Universal Design for Learning, which meets the needs of all children—we realized we don’t need to know the specific disability a child has. There’s also something called a twin-track approach. You can’t just build more inclusive spaces; kids need braille, kids need sign-language literacy, they need glasses or hearing aids. So we were providing both. In Kenya, 70% of children with disabilities are undiagnosed and in the mainstream classroom. We went in with remediation and after-school programs to help, as well specific universal pedagogy. That program, the Kenya Primary Literacy Program, just got canceled. It was in its first year.
Teacher training sounds a bit amorphous. It’s hard to know whether the teachers were applying it or not. Do you have a success story that you can say, well, here is an impact that we had?
We worked a lot on the fact that there were no numbers, there were no resources, there was nothing in place at the time we started, so our progress is much more on intermediary goals. We’ve been working to build assessment instruments, so that this type of data would exist. It’s also what my guide for USAID—published in November and now removed from the web—was guiding other orgs to do: measure the impact of inclusion. Our data in Ghana showed that when you trained teachers in UDL, they implemented it and felt more prepared to include learners with disabilities.
What would you say to people who say that Nepal and Bangladesh and Nigeria need to look after their own and ask why America should look after the disabled kids of other countries?
I’d say we do it to develop ties with communities. If you’re a parent of a child with a disability, which my co-founder is, and you meet a parent of a child with a disability in a different country, you immediately have a very strong bond. That is a relationship that we have cultivated and really established. So we know that when we need to call on allies and friends, these countries are our friends. They are advocating for the American people as well. We also know that a more educated population has greater productivity. We know there’s better economic outcomes and that we reduce migration. These education programs build resilient communities, they build stable political communities, and they build allies with the United States. And honestly, it’s working. Nepal was graduating from a low-income country to a middle-income country in the next year or two, and that’s because the investment of USAID has helped stabilize and build a system. And that, to me, is success.
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Did you see this as Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) work?
Disability rights have actually always been politically a left and a right issue. Republicans say if you support people with disabilities while they’re young, they can get a job, they can be income earners, and that helps the economy. The left has an equal-rights stance on disability inclusion. Honestly, we really became IDP under Trump’s first Administration. Over time, we’ve benefited from DEI, and we, at our hearts, support everybody being included. For example, in our Nepal equity and inclusion in education program, our role was called the DEIA advisor. So we’d seen DEIA have an influence on disability, but they were really pretty different for a very long time.
Have you heard from people who are asking where your service is?
The harder, more pressing matter has actually been trying to pay people. So you know, we haven’t been paid for some of our December work, and we definitely haven’t been paid for most of our January work that we already paid out. So IDP had lost about $350,000 and we now are still owed over $250,000. We’re a woman-owned small business. We’ve never actually generated profits because we work on grants and contracts, there’s not actually profit in them. Every line item is accounted for. So we launched a GoFundMe and raised a little bit over $20,000 to avoid bankruptcy. I have employees with disabilities that need to be paid. We owe them money. But they’re like, What do you need? Can I write a letter? Can I call my congressman? So I try to look at it that way, that if USAID has collapsed, it’s catastrophic for my country and it’s catastrophic for my work, but we’re still going to all be pushing for inclusion.
How much of your revenue came from USAID?
Ninety percent.
In hindsight, did you think, Oh, I really should have diversified my clients?
Yeah. We were a group of consultants that decided it was better to work together, because when you’re a partner, you’re able to really build inclusive systems. When you’re just a consultant by yourself, it’s hard. It was a great business model to create the change we needed to see in these programs. But because the USAID programs went from one to two to four to 18, it was so much work for a very small staff—we’re only 14 staff and nine international. It was really hard to keep up that pace and grow our systems; we were just running to catch up. I don’t think anyone could see that a whole industry would fall. I kind of relate this to COVID, right, where we all went in the pandemic. In the first days, you just couldn’t believe what was happening, that the world would halt.
Is there one loss that keeps you awake at night?
I’m kept up at night mainly for some of our international team members, because I know people live day to day on their income, and that means that you’re very close to poverty immediately from this loss. I have been holding off the grief on what it means to the kids. I’ll get too emotional at the thought of 10,000 kids not being able to go to school. I have a moral sense of responsibility and failure that we won’t be able to do that. I know education isn’t as stark as AIDS medication being stopped, or people starving. To me, it is really striking that the American people are like, Oh, I didn’t know. There’s a lack of consciousness over the atrocity that is happening here.
I had a friend from college contact me after one of my posts about USAID, and the summary of that was that kids in New Hampshire need you too. We ended up having a really good conversation. Politically they want us to fight. They want us to think that because I was working for a child with a disability in Nepal, that I was somehow robbing an opportunity from a child in New Hampshire with a disability. But we all care about kids with disabilities being able to have access. I know that a child in New Hampshire is just as important as a child in Nepal. But the money that is saved from USAID is not going to be given to New Hampshire children. They’re cutting just as much out of education and Medicaid. This is not an either/or. This is not a red or blue. Everyone wants their kids to have an education and have opportunity.
What is your plan going forward?
Our plan is to try and avoid bankruptcy and make sure we can pay out all the people who have to leave, so they have as much money as they can to stabilize their homes for a little bit longer while they search for new jobs. We do have a little bit of U.N. programming and World Bank programming, and if we go bankrupt, we will lose those programs along with it, and that will put those programs in a bind, right? If we can survive, which I think we will, we’ll be working on research and programs with other donors and continuing programs, which means we’ll have to be small. We’ll all go back to being consultants working small and part time and for limited hours, and we’ll try and rebuild. We have a hope that the American people will see that aid is valuable, and maybe someday it’ll come back, which would be great.
