PALABEK, Northern Uganda — Imagine if you were a refugee living at a makeshift settlement in a foreign country with no way to earn a steady income.
Then someone promised you a life-changing opportunity: They'd give you a sum of money and a coach to help you turn it into a source of income.
But just as you are about to receive that support, it gets canceled.
That's what happened to some 8,100 South Sudanese refugees in Uganda this year. They were enrolled in a program with a bureaucratic name — Graduating to Resilience Scale Activity — and a simple strategy: a $205 sum for each participant along with coaching to start a small business.
That may not seem like a lot of money, but in Uganda, the average annual income is $753.
And in the Palabek camp, home to about 100,000 refugees, most people have no way to earn a living other than occasional farming work, at best making $2 a week. The camp is just around 30 miles away from the border with South Sudan, were a civil war and ethnic violence that began in 2013 led tens of thousands of people — many on foot — to flee to Uganda. New refugees continue to arrive every day as conditions in South Sudan remain unstable.
Before the Trump administration's aid cuts, the residents of the camp relied mainly on food or cash from aid groups to survive.
Last year the U.S. government awarded a $15 million grant to the nonprofit group AVSI Foundation to set up what's known as a "Graduation Approach" program serving the refugee and host communities. The goal was that in three years, the participants would ... graduate ... from extreme poverty and become self-supporting. In past studies, similar programs with a onetime cash award plus coaching have produced a "significant" increase in the income of participants after 24 months.
In addition to the refugee households, some 3,500 Ugandans living in extreme poverty near the settlement were to participate. The arrival of tens of thousands of refugees in the area has been a strain for locals as they have had to share limited land, water, and firewood resources with refugees. While the refugees can get some help from aid groups, locals often are overlooked, and AVSI's program aimed to bridge some of that gap.
In February 2025 the grant to AVSI was abruptly nullified — along with thousands of other programs around the world — as part of the overhaul of foreign aid set in motion by the Trump administration.
In the letters the administration sent out to non-profit groups like AVSI, it said the terminated programs were not aligned with U.S. national interests.
AVSI — founded in Italy in 1972 as the Association of Volunteers in International Service — had to lay off 140 local staff recently hired for the Palabek project, according to Rita Larok, the director of programs.
As difficult as it was to let staff go, Larok says it was even harder to break the news to the participants, who saw the project as their only way to becoming self-sufficient. Their "hopes and dreams [were] shattered," she says.
The disappointment of the lost opportunity has reverberated through the settlement and local towns, says Ugandan official Fivi Akullu, the Refugee Desk Officer for the settlement.
"If the U.S. government had a heart, actually, this [funding cut] should have been done phase by phase," she says. "It was a very drastic decision to say this is it. No funding, no nothing."
NPR reached out to the State Department for comment but did not receive a response.
On a trip to Uganda, NPR interviewed some of the individuals affected by the cancellation.
Akim Joseph Yanga: "Let us be resilient"
Akim Joseph Yanga was excited about the cash and the coaching. The 63-year-old planned to buy as many as 5 goats — that's what $205 would cover — and start a small livestock business. He was counting on the program coach to help him figure out the logistics of the business and how to best use his skills to build it.
The AVSI project gave people hope, says Yanga, who'd fled South Sudan in 2019 because of conflict. And in the wake of the program's dissolution, he and other camp officials have seen signs of despair: an increase in cases of violence that have required his mediation, including domestic violence and thefts of neighbors' chickens or goats. There have even been several suicide attempts, he says.
"It is true that when our father, Donald Trump, started reducing the [foreign aid] budget globally. It affected us very seriously," Yanga says, adding that he calls the U.S. president "father" because he sees him as a provider to vulnerable people around the world.
Yanga has been telling disappointed families in the camp not to lose hope.
"My message to them is let us be resilient. God will not forget us. The Samaritans will come and help us."
Santa Angwech: "I was completely hopeless"
Santa Angwech, a 26-year-old single mom with three children, saw the AVSI program as a lifeline. In anticipation of growing a business with the program, she started making cassava chips to sell in the market from cassava she'd planted in front of her hut, with seeds she had received from aid groups.
More so than the money, she was looking forward to what the coaches would teach her: how to build the business, save money, grow additional crops and even how to deal with the gender-based violence that is part of camp life.
In February, she received a text message from AVSI that the program had shut down.
"I was completely hopeless when I saw the message.
"The big question that I have is how you can solve my problems. That is the only thing I need, because if I know how to solve the problem, nothing will defeat me," Angwech says.
She's not angry at the U.S. for its decision to cut aid. "You cannot be angry [at] somebody who refused to give you something because you are just a beggar," she says.
Instead, she prays that funding will flow again soon: "If they do not help us? Where should we start from? What should we do? There is nothing."
Okot Bosco: "America benefits, but they don't know"
For Okot Bosco, 36, the new AVSI program was an opportunity he could only have dreamed of as a refugee at the camp — the former teacher had been hired as a coach to guide participants for the 3-year duration of the project. Now he's lost this job — and his hope of using his salary from AVSI to pay back a loan he'd taken from a local bank to build up a small shop selling basic household items.
He's now struggling with supporting his children and wife and has taken up farming work.
Bosco believes that President Trump, in making these cuts, doesn't understand that not only do recipients of aid benefit — America, as the giver, does too.
"When you're in a problem and someone helps you, you will never forget that person."
That philosophy is reflected in his own life. He was born in a displaced persons camp during the Sudanese civil war of the 1980s.
"I grew up seeing this logo of USAID on the cooking oil can and food boxes — knowing that Americans are the people who can support us in food, education, in medicine, in everything," Bosco says. "America benefits, but they don't know that they are benefiting. They benefit because the people trust them so much."
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