Director of Twin Cities-based group shares how federal cuts are impacting the Horn of Africa

NINA MOINI: The supreme court just this morning has ordered the Trump administration to immediately pay $2 billion owed to USAID contractors for work they've already done. But it does not change the administration's move to cut $60 billion in aid through the agency and countries are already feeling the impact. In the horn of Africa, which includes Djibouti, Eritrea, Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, and Ethiopia, food assistance programs, health care, and nutrition services and projects combating malaria have closed.

On top of that, many countries in the region are facing famine and Sudan is in the middle of a civil war that has created the world's largest and fastest displacement crisis. Mohamed Idris is the executive director of the Twin Cities-based American Relief Agency for the horn of Africa, also known as ARAHA. The organization has field offices in Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Sudan. He joins us now. Thank you very much for being here, Mr. Idris.

MOHAMED IDRIS: Thank you for having me, Nina.

NINA MOINI: I tried to set the scene there of everything that is going on, but you have been doing this work for a long time through ARAHA. Would you start, please, by telling us a little bit about your organization and what it does?

MOHAMED IDRIS: ARAHA is a Twin Cities grassroots humanitarian organization with 25 years of experience working in the horn of Africa region. As you mentioned in your presentation, we work in Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya. And basically we deliver life-saving essentials like food and water. And at the same time, also we try to empower the needy and develop opportunities for them to be self-reliant through education and projects that promote self-reliance.

NINA MOINI: And while your organization, ARAHA, doesn't get funding directly from USAID, how do you generate revenue to be able to help people back in the horn of Africa?

MOHAMED IDRIS: Actually we have a mix of sources of funding, mainly from individual donors across the US as well as partnering with US NGOs that may not have field offices in the ground, in addition to foundations and private foundations and family foundations.

NINA MOINI: And I understand you just got back from a trip to the horn of Africa. I am curious to know what you saw there and if you talked to anybody or people felt like they were feeling any of the effects from losing any type of aid or funding.

MOHAMED IDRIS: I mean, I just came last week, actually, from a trip to Sudan, and Kenya, and Somalia and as you know Sudan right now is considered the largest as well as the fastest growing displacement crisis on Earth. Over 12 million people have been displaced internally about 9 million and maybe over 3 million across the border to neighboring countries.

And the needs are huge, this is a country that's the war ongoing and over 30 million people need assistance, half of them children. Unfortunately, when I visited many of them, I found them overcrowded in public schools and public buildings because when this happened in khartoum and the major cities, people left these cities and went to small towns and small cities where there is no capacity for them.

So they ended up in public schools and public buildings, which resulted also in holding the whole education for the country for almost two years. There is no education there because all public schools have been turned to a displacement centers unfortunately.

NINA MOINI: Wow. Do you-- go ahead.

MOHAMED IDRIS: I just was just describing the situation there, just people being there, thousands of them looking to find food for their children and themselves. And sometimes they get food, sometimes they don't. You see school age children wandering around instead of being in classrooms. It's just the suffering at different levels.

There are people who have chronic illnesses like diabetes and high blood pressure. Almost every day being on the brink of death because they didn't get the necessary medical care.

NINA MOINI: What concerns you about the loss of USAID programs? Do you feel pressure to increase services from organizations like yours, like more grassroots organizations? Or how are you feeling about the uncertainty around the future of aid to that region?

MOHAMED IDRIS: The US is the largest donor to many programs around the world. And if we take the World Food Program, for example, the US is the largest donor, almost half of the budget of the World Food Program has come from the US, and you can imagine the impact. And actually, I think we are already seeing some of the headlines coming out showing the impact.

I was just reading, I think yesterday there was a clashes between Kenyan police and thousands of refugees in Kakuma Camp. Again, it's coming to the shortage of food. Many food banks in Sudan have closed, and this is a country that relies heavily right now on crisis kitchen like us and the one that funded by the USAID.

And many, many countries, Somalia, if we take Somalia as an example, the closure of USAID represents for them a significant setback. For Somalia's development trajectory, this country since the '90s have been experiencing civil war, but things improve with the help of international community.

I was there last month and I saw there are a lot of progress coming in. Every year I visit, I see things are getting better in terms of security, in terms of food. But USAID was a backbone for this. And when you take USAID out of the picture, it's going to be very devastating.

Just to put things in perspective, 60% of NGOs working in Somalia rely on USAID. About almost half of them, they already got the stop order from the current administration. So you could see the impact of this. And this organization work in food security, health services, like maternal and child health, immunization, diseases, disease prevention.

NINA MOINI: It's across the board. Mohamed, before I let you go, what would you encourage people listening now to do? This problem, it feels very far away for some people, they don't quite know how they can help because there was so much reliance on federal funding and other organizations. For people listening now, what's the best way to help?

MOHAMED IDRIS: I think first of all, just to take it from a perspective, I think here in the US, we need to know that the whole foreign aid it's a small budget, it's about 1% of the total US budget. And also I think it's important for us to know that this is not about only helping others and about doing the right things. It's about helping ourselves because the world is interconnected right now and we are almost one flight away from any epidemics.

And if we are not engaged, if we are not involved, we will feel the pain as well. So I think people now need to step in. Hopefully, the current administration will revisit their decision and hopefully they will reopen the funding. But at the same time, people need to step in and helping organizations like ARAHA who's also on the ground. And we would love your listeners to visit our website araha.org, A-R-A-H-A.org.

NINA MOINI: Got it. Mohamed, thank you so much for your time and your efforts. I really appreciate you.

MOHAMED IDRIS: Thank you Nina for having me. Appreciate it.

NINA MOINI: That was Mohamed Idris, the executive director of Twin Cities-based ARAHA.