HARARE, ZIMBABWE — Caroline Mawoyo watches her 16-year-old daughter wash dishes outside their wooden cabin. The teenager should be donning a fresh uniform for her first year in secondary school. Instead, she faces an uncertain future.
Mawoyo, 37, got word on Jan. 22 that community care workers at Mavambo Orphan Care, an organization that once guaranteed her daughter’s education, can no longer pay for school.
“The news devastated me. What I felt is indescribable,” she says. “I depended entirely on that support for my children’s well-being.”
Mavambo Orphan Care assists not only orphans but also children vulnerable to poverty and its effects. Now, the organization is crippled by an abrupt United States policy that ended nearly all foreign aid.
Historically, the US Agency for International Development has pumped at least US$4 billion annually into children’s programming worldwide. In 2024 alone, Zimbabwe received more than US$12 million for vulnerable children, including orphans.
And since 2020, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief has funded a variety of services for nearly 400,000 vulnerable and orphaned children, including antiretroviral therapy for those with HIV/AIDS, and paying school fees.
That funding was pulled on Jan. 20, when US President Donald Trump signed an executive order that stopped nearly all work by USAID, the main US foreign humanitarian aid organization, as well as by PEPFAR. Critical lifesaving services were technically allowed to continue under a waiver, but across the board, that work stopped either immediately or within hours of Trump’s executive order. Emergency food aid for starving people ended, as did medical services for people dying of tuberculosis and other illnesses.
As in the case of Mavambo Orphan Care, education services for children who otherwise couldn’t afford to attend school also ended.
“It was hard delivering such news when you fully know that most of them are unable to cover the fees,” says one community care worker, who asked not to be named due to fear of retribution.
National efforts to help vulnerable children do exist. The Basic Education Assistance Module supports over 1.5 million children who have never enrolled or have dropped out of school due to economic challenges. But economic challenges plague the Zimbabwean government, too. Funds are delayed for that program, too, says Taungana Ndoro, director of communication and advocacy for the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education.
Ruvarashe Murangariri, Mawoyo’s daughter, missed four years of school, until 2021, when Mavambo Orphan Care stepped in to pay her fees.
Now, Murangariri says, she’s embarrassed.
“When some people ask me if I am in school, I lie because I don’t want people to look down on me,” she says.
For children with HIV, the situation is even more dire. Over 480,000 children in Zimbabwe are orphans due to HIV, according to 2023 data from the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS.
Maggie Goromondo cares for her two grandchildren, whose parents died. One child has HIV. It’s not clear how — or if — that child will receive HIV medication anymore when even modest school fees are out of reach.
“I am a vendor and get 2 to 3 dollars a day, but the fees for my grandchildren combined are about 180 dollars,” she says. “Where will I get that?”
