A freeze on United States foreign aid funding announced by the Trump administration in early 2025 was having a devastating impact on Haiti’s HIV response and on a wide range of humanitarian and development programs that depended on American funding. The UN’s Deputy Spokesperson confirmed on March 21, 2025 that the funding freeze was “having a devastating impact on the overall HIV response, including treatment and prevention” in Haiti.
Haiti has one of the highest HIV prevalence rates in the Caribbean, and US government funding through PEPFAR had been a cornerstone of the country’s HIV treatment and prevention infrastructure. The freeze forced clinics to reduce services, disrupted antiretroviral therapy for patients whose lives depended on continuous treatment, and threatened to undo years of painstaking progress against the epidemic. Patients who lost access to medication faced potentially life-threatening viral load increases.
The humanitarian consequences of the funding freeze extended far beyond HIV. American aid had funded food assistance programs reaching hundreds of thousands of food-insecure Haitians, water and sanitation projects serving communities without clean water access, child protection services, and educational programs for children displaced by violence. Each of these programs faced potential suspension or significant reduction as the funding freeze cut off their financial lifelines.
Haitian civil society organizations and international humanitarian bodies called on the US administration to exempt Haiti from the funding freeze given the severity of the humanitarian emergency on the ground. They argued that cutting humanitarian assistance to a country experiencing famine conditions, mass displacement, and one of the world’s worst ongoing security crises was both morally indefensible and strategically counterproductive.