On January 8, 2026 local time, Member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Chairperson of the African Union (AU) Commission Mahmoud Ali Youssouf jointly held the ninth China-AU Strategic Dialogue at the AU headquarters in Addis Ababa.

Wang Yi said that the AU is the “locomotive” driving African unity and cooperation, playing an important and unique role in China-Africa relations. President Xi Jinping has sent congratulatory messages to the AU Summits for 13 consecutive years, which fully demonstrates China’s high regard for developing relations with the AU. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the start of diplomatic relations between China and Africa, and also the 36th consecutive year for Africa to be the destination of the Chinese Foreign Minister’s first overseas trip in a new year. This diplomatic tradition reflects the continuity of China-Africa friendship, the stability of China’s policy toward Africa, and the solidarity of developing countries. The unity and concerted efforts of over 2.8 billion people in China and Africa will enable them to overcome any difficulties and challenges, accelerate their pace toward modernization, and contribute to a more just, equitable, harmonious and stable world.

Wang Yi said that both China and Africa are at a critical stage of development and are facing new and broad opportunities for cooperation. China is willing to leverage its own development to provide support for the vast number of developing countries, including those in Africa, to achieve modernization together and jointly safeguard the interests of the Global South. The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) has played an important role in the common development of China and Africa, blazing a path of win-win cooperation between China and Africa.

The State Department is negotiating agreements with countries across the developing world to provide billions of dollars in health aid, an effort intended to replace the system of global health assistance that had for decades been offered through the now-dismantled U.S. Agency for International Development.

Over the past month the U.S. has signed agreements with 16 African countries to provide more than $11 billion in health aid over the next five years, and is negotiating dozens more deals with governments in Asia and Latin America as well as Africa.

The new commitments represent a steep drop in the health aid that the United States contributed before President Trump ordered a review of foreign assistance on his first day in office last year. According to an analysis by the nonprofit Partners in Health, health funding under the agreements would drop by 69 percent to Rwanda, 61 percent to Madagascar, 42 percent to Liberia and 34 percent to Eswatini, where a quarter of adults live with H.I.V.

Nevertheless, the deals are being welcomed by governments and some analysts in Africa as a significant shift that could increase country autonomy and make health systems stronger and less reliant on international largess. Others, however, say the agreements were negotiated with countries that had no leverage and demand conditions that are unattainable, especially in places where people are most in need of help.

The U.S. government has signed health deals with at least nine African countries, part of its new approach to global health funding, with agreements that reflect the Trump administration’s interests and priorities and are geared toward providing less aid and more mutual benefits.

The agreements signed so far, with Kenya, Nigeria and Rwanda among others, are the first under the new global health framework, which makes aid dependent on negotiations between the recipient country and the U.S.

Some of the countries that have signed deals either have been hit by U.S. aid cuts or have separate agreements with the Trump administration to accept and host third-country deportees, although officials have denied any linkage.

On World AIDS Day 2025, humanity should be celebrating that there is a new shot available which offers six months of protection against the transmission of HIV, the virus which has already infected approximately 40 million living people and taken the lives of 44 million more.

Instead, public health workers are reeling from how President Donald Trump has helped HIV to circulate in more humans this year than last. The lethal ways the current U.S. health policy is harming the health and wealth of LGBTQ+ people worldwide will be felt for years, if not decades.

“It’s heartbreaking,” says Velontafa Jackia, a doctor based in Sambava, in the north-east of Madagascar. Until this year she was part of a project funded by the United States Agency for International Development (usaid) that helped send health workers to even the remotest parts of the impoverished island. But since the funding stopped, fewer patients have been seen. Ms Jackia lists the effects: more birth complications, more maternal deaths, more malarial deaths and “lots of outbreaks”. She sighs: “We’ve been reliant too much on aid and now it’s gone.”

Nine months after Donald Trump’s administration began dismantling usaid the effects are being felt across sub-Saharan Africa, where America supplied more than two-thirds of the bilateral aid for public health. The Trump administration says the largesse created a “culture of dependency”. Its America First Global Health Strategy, published in September, says recipient governments must do more of the work and pay for more of it themselves. This is a good idea in theory, but in practice many people are going to die as aid is reduced.

Over the past year, wealthy countries around the world have undermined a decades-old consensus that human dignity is universal and that nations have a responsibility to further it. The shuttering of the United States Agency for International Development, which I led for five years, is just one piece of a broader, tragic retreat from a system of foreign aid that helped cure the sick, feed the hungry and empower the poor.

Countries, including the United States, Canada, Britain and Germany, have slashed billions in assistance. Research published by The Lancet estimates that more than 14 million people could die as a result of American aid cuts alone — 4.5 million of them children younger than 5. This is a moral failure that will make the whole world less safe, less secure and less prosperous.

Amid the tragedy, it is tempting to defend what we know. Fortunately, leaders in Africa, Asia, Latin America and elsewhere are building something new. They are taking ownership of their countries’ own development, figuring out ways to leverage new technology and, most important, encouraging private investment — long the single biggest challenge for development projects. Their initiatives are modeling a way to lift up the vulnerable that will be more sustainable in the 21st century.

President Trump’s cuts to humanitarian assistance abroad have hurt all kinds of people. But from what I see on the ground, those suffering the most are women and girls — and that will leave all of us, including men and boys, worse off…

To travel through these impoverished villages east of the Congolese border in the aftermath of aid cuts is to see a kaleidoscope of pain shared by all but felt most acutely by women.

Karungi Kevin, 46, survived sexual assault in the Democratic Republic of Congo that left her with serious health complications. She fled in February to Uganda, where cuts in health services have left her struggling to get care. Women’s health programs have been particularly hurt by funding cuts.

UNAIDS welcomes the announcement by the US State Department that the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) will be supporting an initiative by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria to provide lenacapavir to up to 2 million people in countries with high burdens of HIV.

Lenacapavir, an American-based innovation, is one of the most promising new HIV prevention tools that has emerged in the HIV response, offering protection against HIV with just twice-yearly injections. The breakthrough medicine will save thousands of lives if made widely available for all people and populations at risk of HIV including young women and adolescent girls as well as sex workers, people who inject drugs, and men who have sex with men in high burden countries and geographies.

Message from Marco Rubio to the American People:

The United States is the world’s health leader. More innovative drugs and medical devices are developed in the United States than anywhere else in the world. If you are sick, there is nowhere you would rather be cared for than in the United States.

Over the past several decades, we have extended our health leadership globally. We have helped contain thousands of infectious disease outbreaks around the world, stopping numerous potential pandemics in their tracks before they could reach our shores. Our health foreign assistance programs, most notably the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), have saved over 26 million lives and prevented 7.8 million babies from being born with HIV / AIDS. There is much to be proud of.

But there are also many problems – our foreign assistance programs are deeply broken.

Our health foreign assistance programs in particular have become inefficient and wasteful, too often creating parallel healthcare delivery systems and a culture of dependency among recipient countries.

As President Trump seeks to control spending on Congressional approved budgets for social services and humanitarian aid, the American people need to investigate and seriously consider alternative funding for programs and agencies that impact human life in this country and in foreign nations that we have helped for decades. We are looking at a 1% super wealth tax on the richest of richest Americans that could raise in excess of $70 billion per year. The rationale is that these richest of richest have made their fortunes because of the U.S. economy. Many have made billions doing business with the U.S. government. Also the lifestyles and business operations of this group has a much greater effect on the environment and climate change that the average American. What follows is an executive summary followed by a more detailed white paper.

This paper proposes a targeted, sustainable financing mechanism to cover the estimated U.S. humanitarian aid shortfall of $9B annually. By combining a 1% surtax on billionaire income with a 1% surtax on billionaire stock gains, revenues would flow into a Humanitarian Aid Reserve Fund (HARF). The fund stabilizes aid flows, guarantees predictable baselines, and creates capacity for extraordinary crisis response.

DOGE, Elon Musk’s budget assassination team, gutted decades old humanitarian agencies like U.S. A.I.D. and PEPFAR that saved lives across the world. DOGE and Trumps Big Beautiful Atrocity of a Budget Bill further cut important programs that assisted the vulnerable in the United States. We took a look, with the help of AI, how the wealthiest 1% of Americans could pay a fairer share of taxes to help the funding shortfall. Learning from past experiences in Europe, we see that a wealth tax holds promise in the U.S. if the Congress has the courage to hold the richest to help the poorest.

Not long after John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as president, he received his first visit from a foreign leader. He had chosen Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president. By today’s standards, in which Africa seems to sit on the far margins of world affairs, the selection is practically unimaginable.

But even as a senator, Mr. Kennedy had begun to see Africa — with its enormous landmass, newly independent countries and young population — as a continent full of promise. By one count, during his presidential campaign speeches in 1960 he mentioned Africa 479 times. As president, he was keen to compete for influence there with the Soviet Union and even side with anticolonialism, courting tension with America’s European allies.

Until Mr. Kennedy’s assassination, Mr. Nkrumah remained the American president’s most important African interlocutor, a fact that reflects both the Ghanaian leader’s charisma and the tremendous prestige he had earned on the continent by peacefully leading his country to independence from colonial rule in 1957. Driven by his belief in Pan-Africanism, Mr. Nkrumah worked tirelessly to overcome the Balkanizing impact of colonial rule across Africa.

As the world’s powers turn away from the continent, it’s a vision that may hold the key to realizing Africa’s potential today.

A $45 treatment can keep a child alive.

Starvation in Gaza has brought intense international attention to the horrors of famine, but less attention has been paid to a wider issue: the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. has worsened the problem of severe hunger and malnutrition throughout the world.

Saving children with severe acute malnutrition is simple and inexpensive. Each packet costs less than 30 cents, but contains a high-calorie mix of peanuts, sugar, milk powder and oil — flavors appealing to children — and a blend of vitamins and minerals. A complete six-week treatment for a severely malnourished child runs to less than $45.

U.S.A.I.D. funded roughly half the world’s supply of ready-to-use therapeutic food, or R.U.T.F., purchasing some directly from American manufacturers and funding the United Nations Children Fund, or UNICEF, to manage its distribution.

All those grants were abruptly halted when the Trump administration froze foreign aid earlier this year.

In recent years charitable giving has undergone profound transformations since the “golden age” of giving, from the 1990s to early 2000s.  This has left a general feeling of pessimism not just in the populations that need assistance, but with the thousands of workers who dedicated their careers to humanitarian work and now are left with no job or path to help others

 How did we get to this place?

 The landscape of charitable giving has drastically changed from the large-scale event like Live Aid that categorized the “golden age”. A little perspective might help though. As groundbreaking as Live Aid was in raising public consciousness of saving the world, $40 million was raised on the day of the concerts in London and Philadelphia. It’s an impressive number, but the budgets now for humanitarian projects are in the billions of dollars. You need big, big money to have an impact.

When you look at some of the data as it relates to aid in African countries, some insights begin to present themselves. 1. All of Africa spends too much on debt and that severely inhibits their ability to serve the health needs of their population. 2. As the U.S. and other wealthy nations cut back on foreign aid budgets, African lives will be lost and those statistics are staggering, bringing back the dark days of the 1980’s when AIDS first hit the continent. 3. More revenue must be generated and greater manufacturing capabilities must be built in Africa. The continent must move closer to achieving its economic potential. U.S. and China, the two most promising development partners, are interested in getting a return on their investments, be that aid or trade.

DOGE’s cuts to U.S.A.I.D. aren’t just a case study in the Trump administration going after woke spending or trying to change the federal government’s bottom line. It was also crucial to a larger shift in foreign policy strategy.

The whole apparatus that the United States has used traditionally to exercise soft power is being gutted, redirected and transformed. And that means changes to how the United States does aid and development work, how it promotes democracy around the world and the way it relates to foreign governments.

My guest today is well positioned to bring some clarity to this shift in strategy and values.

Jeremy Lewin is a youthful veteran of DOGE, a 28-year-old with no government experience before January, who’s now a State Department official in charge of implementing the Trump administration’s sweeping changes to foreign aid and development work.

Before the DOGE cuts, before the pandemic, before Trump even, we spent three years off and on in Africa investigating the HIV/AIDS crisis for Johnson & Johnson. Our travels took us to Kenya. South Africa and Zimbabwe. We saw how complex the issue is from extreme poverty to gender violence to a population that got the short end of the stick because where they were born. One shining and inspiring example of success we found was Nyumbani. Nyumbani is a relatively self-sufficent village of now 800 children and adults impacted by AIDS that could be a model for how to address displaced populations and a future with less humanitarian aid. We’ve edited an article that was written a few years ago to give you a sense of this unique place.

The U.S. GOP Congress, with few exceptions fell in line, to pass Donald Trump’s Federal budget that not just cut key social services to vulnerable Americans, but also obliterated U.S. humanitarian aid. Trump promised his billionaire donors massive tax breaks and he delivered on those breaks, risking the economy by irresponsibly raising the deficit and almost guaranteeing  that upwards of 14 million will die because of disease and starvation.

Let’s look at a list of some of the Trump billionaire posse.

34 African countries spend more on debt than healthcare.

If Africa cannot take ownership of the HIV responses in the face of cuts, our continent could return to the darkest days of AIDS.

I lead the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).  In 2023, 3,500 people acquired HIV every day. According to our latest estimates, if the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is not reinstated, and nothing comes in its place, that figure will grow to 5,800.