We are Tulane University faculty who work on projects funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. While some of the disruptions to humanitarian assistance and public health programs resulting from the deliberate dismantling and defunding of the agency by the Trump administration have been widely publicized, members of the Tulane community may not be aware of the long-standing research collaborations supported by USAID-funded projects at our university. Our work spans across many disciplines, and the cancellation of our grants and contracts has directly impacted our ability to conduct academic research of vital interest to global health. By sharing our experiences, we hope to highlight the many ways that our research has contributed to sustainable development and the value that USAID-funded projects have added to our academic community.
The Tulane Center for Applied Malaria and Research at the Celia Scott Weatherhead School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine has been a consortium partner for two key USAID programs, the President’s Malaria Initiative and the Global Health Program Evaluation, Analysis, Research, and Learning initiative. PMI, which was established in 2005 under former President George W. Bush, focuses on delivering low-cost, highly effective malaria treatment and prevention interventions in the most affected areas of Africa. Through PMI and GH PEARL awards, CAMRE faculty and graduate students were funded to assess the impacts of interventions aimed at improving malaria prevention, diagnosis, and case management in Sierra Leone, Cambodia and Côte d’Ivoire. Additionally, CAMRE was provisionally awarded a three-year, $1.5 million grant through USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures to evaluate a low-cost strategy for preventing severe malaria deaths in rural Zambia. In February, PMI and related USAID programs were all shut down. Researchers at the Malaria Atlas Project have estimated that the cancellation of these programs will result in as many as 17.8 million preventable malaria cases and 166,000 additional malaria deaths each year.
Since 2010, Tulane has operated the Highly Vulnerable Children Research Center in South Africa, home of the world’s largest HIV and AIDS pandemic. With funding from the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief provided by USAID, Tulane’s HVC-RC has led studies evaluating initiatives to mitigate sexual risk behavior and improve mental and physical health. HVC-RC has also led the deployment of an online community-based information management system to improve service delivery and reporting for all USAID-funded South African PEPFAR programs supporting orphans, vulnerable children, adolescent girls and young women. CBIMS enables partners to successfully track and optimize the provision of life-saving services for HIV prevention, detection, care and treatment. The termination of this and other PEPFAR funded programs is expected to result in otherwise preventable rises in HIV incidence and HIV-related deaths.
Tulane faculty have also been engaged with USAID-supported projects related to food security information systems for decades, beginning with contributions to the development and deployment of the Famine Early Warning System in the 1980s. In the intervening years, our research has continued to support initiatives to improve data collection and analysis for global food security systems that have been widely used to identify populations in need, optimize assistance programs and monitor rapidly changing environments. Teams of quantitative and qualitative researchers at Tulane have applied their technical expertise to conduct data-driven evaluations of USAID-funded projects aiming to bring families out of entrenched poverty in isolated rural communities through education, job training, agriculture and hazard mitigation. The cancellation of our projects is just one small part of the dismantling of food security information systems that are relied upon by humanitarian assistance agencies worldwide.
Finally, Tulane researchers have contributed to expanding access to education and training. We have supported the development of schools of public health in low- and middle-income countries including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Rwanda and Vietnam. One recently cancelled project, which was implemented in partnership with the Kinshasa School of Public Health, used rigorous sampling and measuring methods to assess changes in a variety of key global health indicators related to maternal and child well-being resulting from a USAID-funded Integrated Health Program. In addition to providing essential data, this project was an opportunity for local skill and research competence building, thus furthering the long-term USAID vision to empower countries and local actors to take charge of their own development. These schools are now themselves at great risk due to the loss of federal grants and contracts.
The ripple effects of the dismantling of USAID will be felt far beyond projects that it directly funded, and the aftershocks will affect not only poor communities in developing countries but also humanitarians, health providers and educators around the globe. It remains to be seen whether USAID will survive and the damage already done will be difficult to repair, but our commitment to this vitally important research is unshaken.
Thomas Eisele, Julie Hernandez, Michelle Lacey, Nancy Mock, Tonya Thurman and Janna Wisniewski
