A group of nearly 80 Afghan women studying in Oman on US-funded scholarships were almost sent back Afghanistan when they were informed their scholarships were ending amid cuts to US foreign aid.
Since regaining power in Afghanistan nearly four years ago, the Taliban have subjected women in the country to draconian restrictions, including banning them from accessing education. To continue their studies, this group of 80 women went to Oman, but their scholarships were nearly terminated last month.
This is just one example of the how US President Donald Trump’s foreign aid freeze and efforts to dismantle the US Agency for International Development (USAID) have put women and girls across the globe at risk.
Offering a temporary reprieve, a US State Department spokesperson told the BBC that funding will continue until 30 June 2025.
The women were pursuing graduate and postgraduate degrees under the Women’s Scholarship Endowment (WSE), a USAID program launched in 2018 to fund studies in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. On 28 February, they were informed their scholarships were ending and they would be sent back to Afghanistan within two weeks.
“We are relieved now, but we are still deeply concerned about our future,” an anonymous student told the BBC. “If the scholarship is not renewed, we will be left with no option but to return to Afghanistan, where we cannot study, and our safety could be under threat as well.”
In Chad, USAID funding cuts are being felt by tens of thousand Sudanese refugees, mostly women and children, who are in the country and in need of basic survival essentials.
“My house was burned down. We were left with nothing really. Nothing to eat or drink. Nothing to sleep on or under,” one Sudanese woman, Fatehiyya Mohamed Adam told the New York Times.
Mohamed Adam first fled war in 2023, before losing everything through an accidental fire in a refugee camp along the Chad-Sudan border. HIAS, a refugee advocacy NGO, had been providing the refugees here -the Aboutengue Camp in Chad- with critical support, but this has come to a halt with the USAID funding cuts.
Trump’s halt on foreign aid is part of federal spending cuts from a so-called “department of government efficiency”, led by Elon Musk.
On Tuesday, a US federal judge ruled that the department’s shutting down of USAID likely violated the US constitution.
The judge, Theodore Chuang has ordered the Trump administration to reverse some of the actions it took to dismantle the agency. As part of an injunction, the judge also halted efforts to terminate USAid officials and contractors, and reinstate former employees’ access to their government email, security and payment systems.
The decision follows six weeks of unprecedented chaos at USAID, where the agency’s workforce has gone from 10,000 to just 611 employees, as reported by the Guardian.
Staff were also locked out of facilities and systems, 5,200 of 6,200 global programs were abruptly terminated and employees were reportedly told to destroy classified documents.