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Hi everyone, I'm Ed Butler.

Welcome to Business Daily on the BBC World Service, the show that digs deep into the world of money and work.

Today, we're taking different perspectives on a theme that's concerned development officials, indeed many people across Africa, over the

last year or more. What does it mean for the continent to have lost some $8 billion in US aid funding

practically overnight? The United States is not a global charity. What impact have those

USAID cuts had on the world's poorest continent?

Hundreds of thousands of lives were going to be lost in a matter of months.

The effect of USAID cuts.

That's our double take here on Business Daily on the BBC.

A quick reminder when Donald Trump re-entered the White House in January last year,

one of his earliest executive orders was to cut most U.S. aid funding to Africa and other poorer parts of the world.

In a truth social post at the time, he called the levels of aid totally unexplainable.

Close it down, he cried. More than 80% of

reviewed grants were terminated, affecting about 20% of all aid reaching the African continent. And since then,

many aid experts have warned of dire consequences. Dr. Atul Gawande is a public health expert, a Biden White House appointee who helped

to run USAID. He believes that the cuts brought about the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives

already. We're in the midst of public man-made death now, and yet it can be so hard to see because

it doesn't happen like in a war where the bomb drops and then

you see the bodies in the field. We now know it's not just malnutrition. We see loss of control

of HIV, loss of control of TB, all of the technical assistance we gave to many governments and

communities that enabled the increases

...