Empowering leaders amid Trump’s global aid cuts

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

Dr. Samantha Nutt: When we saw what happened with the Taliban in Afghanistan in the fall of Kabul, we were already operational in nine different districts. Most of those were already under de facto Taliban control. We did have a period of time where our operations were suspended in Kabul, but then we were able to resume our activities, including our Women and Girls Education and Economic Development work. Sometimes you have to hold your nose and you have to be diplomatic, and you have to negotiate with people that you fundamentally disagree with. Nothing will ever change if we just allow the present to erase the progress of the past.

Bob Safian: That’s Samantha Nutt, president of War Child USA and War Child Canada. When I first learned about War Child, I was blown away by the impact Sam and her group have had on at-risk children in some of the world’s worst conflict zones. With the US spending billions in humanitarian aid, I wanted to ask Sam about the real world impacts. Her perspective is bracing, illuminating, and inspiring, and her enthusiasm about the generosity of Americans as separate from the US government is unexpected. So let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian and this is Rapid Response. I am Bob Safian. I’m here with DR. NUTT, founder and president of War Child USA and War Child Canada. Sam, great to chat with you. Thanks for being here.

DR. NUTT: Well, thank you for having me, Bob.

SAFIAN: So War Child helps children and families in communities impacted by armed conflict all around the world. Can you give us a practical sense of what that entails? What does it look like?

DR. NUTT: We are the bridge between emergency humanitarian assistance and then the things that children and their families need to actually rebuild and recover in war zones. So a lot of groups are doing really important emergency work, food, water, shelter, and blankets, but they aren’t thinking about the long-term. What do kids and their families need to be able to recover from war, to become more resilient, to foster peace within their communities? And so that is what we do. So for example, in Sudan, for many years we’ve been on the ground since the early 2000s. I’ve been there many times. We were doing catch-up learning programming.

So for people who had been displaced as a result of the conflict within the country, many millions of them, it’s gotten a lot worse. We’ll talk about that probably a bit later, but many millions of them were living in camps for internally displaced people. And then they were out of school and they were falling further and further behind and they had fewer options. And so we were running catch-up learning programs that we developed, that we’re known throughout the world to allow children to catch up on their education, to reintegrate back into the appropriate grade level, to complete their studies, and then to provide for themselves. If you don’t do those kinds of things and kids continue to fall further behind, they’re more easily recruited, they’re more vulnerable, their families are more vulnerable. And then that cycle of poverty just becomes more and more entrenched.

SAFIAN: I mean, you served as a doctor helping children and families affected by war before you started War Child. And you chose to focus this organization on education and job opportunities, which focuses on sort of the fallout after conflict because the attention sort of drops away at that point?

Copy LinkAddressing the long-term impacts of war

DR. NUTT: War isn’t a short-term issue, right? So you don’t have a situation where war goes on for a few months and then suddenly goes away. That never happens. It goes on for years and years and years, and the effects of war are felt for generations. And I did start right out of medical school. I was recruited by UNICEF to work in Somalia during the famine in the early ’90s. When the next crisis hit, when Rwanda hit, all of that capacity packed up and moved to the next crisis and left communities completely dependent and completely decimated. And then what happened as a result of that, is violence started to resurface.

And so unless you address the drivers of war, and the drivers of war are things like poverty, instability, the lack of rights and opportunities for women and girls, especially keeping young boys out of the militia groups through education, through skills training, through economic development, you are going to face a situation where countries are locked in conflict, they’re locked in crisis, and they become more and more vulnerable and more dependent on humanitarian aid. And the reality is it’ll never be enough. And we’re seeing that play out in the world right now. We’re seeing an explosion in the number of crises that the world is facing. We’re seeing the withdrawal of the US in particular, the withdrawal of USAID. So less money that’s available to address these crises right as they become more critical and millions of people are at risk.

SAFIAN: You work a lot through local organizations. You mentioned sort of finding local folks who can do things. That’s not what a lot of NGOs do, it’s not what UNICEF does. It also means the work gets really dispersed though, right? Like communicating and coordinating among all that must be complicated.

Copy LinkWorking with local organizations in conflict zones

DR. NUTT: It can be, but it doesn’t have to be. I mean, for example, we have more than a thousand staff throughout the world. 99.9% of them are local to the countries in which we are operating, including at the most senior level, the country director level. And it takes us time to be operational. We’re not an organization that, you’ll see a headline in the news that says, “This is terrible, this is happening in this place.” And we’ll say, “Well, we’re there and please give to us now.” That’s not how we operate. Sometimes it will take us a couple of years to identify our staff, identify our partners, to build up that capacity to develop our strategies in conjunction with other organizations that are on the ground because we don’t want to duplicate services.

I mean, when I saw what happened with the Taliban in Afghanistan in the fall of Kabul, we were already operational in nine different districts. Most of those were already under de facto Taliban control. We did have a period of time where our operations were suspended in Kabul, but then we were able to resume our activities, including our Women and Girls Education and Economic Development work that we’ve been doing for more than 20 years. And we could do that because we were locally driven, locally accepted, and widely respected. And that, I think, is an important point of distinction for the kind of work that we do in our organization.

SAFIAN: And no conflict with the Taliban now as you’re trying to —

DR. NUTT: I mean, look, these things are never easy, right? I mean, I’ve been doing this work for 30 years and sometimes you have to hold your nose and you have to be diplomatic and you have to negotiate with people that you fundamentally disagree with on every conceivable level, especially for me as a woman. At the same time, we have 170 staff in Afghanistan, all local, half of those staff are women and they are doing critical services to women and girls who, in this moment in time, in this moment in history, would have nothing else. They don’t have the opportunity to go to school after grade six. They don’t have the opportunity for higher education. They don’t have the opportunity to get a job. And so if we’re not careful and thoughtful about how we interact with the Taliban and how we negotiate safe spaces for the women who depend on us and for our staff, then we’re out. And if we’re out, that is absolutely devastating for hundreds of thousands of people, the vast majority of whom are women and girls.

Copy LinkConfronting the consequences of humanitarian aid cuts

SAFIAN: You alluded to this earlier, that the Trump administration has stripped a ton of funding from humanitarian organizations. I’m curious what that meant for you at War Child when you first heard about USAID funds being slashed. Where were you and what was your reaction?

DR. NUTT: I was screaming at the television. Look, it’s devastating. It’s absolutely devastating for the humanitarian movement. Nothing like this has ever happened, certainly in the 30 years that I have been doing this kind of work.  The US was the single largest contributor to foreign aid to humanitarian assistance in the world, over $9.5 billion. Now it sounds like a giant number, but it represented a very minuscule amount of the US budget. It was less than 1% of the US budget every year, but it kept millions and millions and millions of people alive. We have more than 30 million people in the world who are food insecure. You have children, millions of children who are at risk of acute starvation within the next few months. And the US was one of the major contributors, for example, to the World Food Program, providing that kind of food security work. And that was just one example of what they did. So for us, even though we may not have been very directly impacted —

SAFIAN: So you are not a beneficiary of USAID funds?

DR. NUTT: We have been, we certainly have been over the years, but we were very fortunate in the sense that we didn’t have any active contracts. However, because we work in partnership with so many organizations, it has affected us. So the UNFPA was one of our partners for Afghanistan. We’re doing the direct implementation of that work. We lost about a million dollars in granting because the UNFPA lost a million dollars in granting as a result of USAID withdrawal. And that has resulted in us having to close one of our children and youth centers, and that affects tens of thousands of kids.

At the same time, we’re in South Sudan, very food insecure, very, very insecure country in general. You can’t drive from one location in South Sudan to the other. There are not passable roads, it’s too insecure. You have to rely on UN humanitarian flights that are run by the World Food Program. Those flights used to be a few hundred dollars. Now they can’t afford to run those flights. And so that means that we no longer have access to key populations that are in desperate need. And this is an example. I mean, we’re one organization, but we are seeing the layoff of thousands upon thousands of people who had tremendous expertise, credibility, who were doing lifesaving work throughout the world. And that is all evaporating. And there is no question that the US withdrawal and USAID’s contraction will result in greater chaos and greater instability, and that will ultimately harm the US interest in the long run.

SAFIAN: So I want to pose something there. There’s been this trope, no one has died from the US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, referring to the aid cuts. Now other folks claim hundreds of thousands, even millions of lives are at stake. Can you clarify, what are the different folks talking about?

DR. NUTT: Look, I think you can hide behind the lack of direct accountability, right? It is never the case that you cut off USAID and you can draw a direct line between, “Well, this person died as a result of that.” But what you do know is that when you start pulling on the thread of a sweater, what that’s going to look like. And for example, in Sudan, you have the worst displacement crisis, more than 10 million people displaced within Sudan. And when you have the world’s biggest funder saying, “Well, we’re not going to provide food security,” there is no question that they’re going to die. And while you can hide behind the veil of a lack of direct accountability, the fallout, it is clear, it is apparent, it is unignorable to anyone who has ever been on the ground in any of these situations, and we can see it coming at us like a freight train while we’re standing there just twiddling our thumbs.

Copy LinkBalancing personal emotions with the drive to create change

SAFIAN: You’ve been trying to help kids at War Child for a long time now. You have a lot of passion about it. You must also get frustrated sometimes that the world doesn’t seem to learn the reality of the work and the need that you’re addressing. What do you do with that?

DR. NUTT: It’s hard, and you know that there are moments when, yeah, you are raging against the wind and it can be incredibly frustrating. It’s often not the things that you would imagine that are frustrating. You expect governments to fail, you expect donors to change priorities, you expect people to not necessarily have a high level of literacy or experience around what actually works when it comes to this kind of humanitarian assistance. We often reward the wrong things at the expense of the right ones. We feel good donating and getting a chicken or a goat to somebody, but that’s not going to change the world.

Getting a kid into school that’s been out of school for more than 10 years, that’s changing that kid’s life and that’s changing their community’s life. And what frustrates me and what enrages me all the time is that you see those gains, you can prove that it works. You have all of these people who believe in it and who demonstrate that it’s possible. And then you’ve got people who go, “Well, why should I care about kids in Africa?” And that’s the stuff that makes me drink bourbon. Not too much, mostly.

SAFIAN: I remember having a conversation with Jose Andres, the founder of World Central Kitchen, who talked about how when he’s in a crisis, he’s so conscious of the impact he’s having on people’s lives. And then when he goes back home and he’s in a nice place and he’s taking a shower or making a meal and he’s got hot water and sometimes it makes him feel guilty, like he’s not really sure how to manage those emotions on both sides. And I wonder how you manage it?

DR. NUTT: There have certainly been, especially when I was younger, there were moments when I was absolutely a self-righteous pain in the ass. Some people will tell you I still am. It’s not a problem that we can enjoy food security and a great glass of wine and a wonderful night out and see a Broadway show and do all of those things. What’s the problem is that so many millions of people can’t enjoy that because they’re falling asleep every night while guns are firing and bombs are dropping. That’s a problem. So I’m not interested in shaming anyone for doing anything. What I would like them to consider-

SAFIAN: Or shaming yourself?

DR. NUTT: Oh, I mean, look, I carry a lot of grief and a lot of guilt, but it’s not what you would expect. It’s because I’ve lost so many friends doing this work and why am I here and they’re not here? And so I don’t rail against what we have here. I find that this is my moment to just stabilize and to get back to what I need to be doing, which is to raise money to make that stuff happen and to build good programs and to build a stronger organization.

SAFIAN: And when a new conflict breaks out somewhere in the world, how do you decide whether to jump in? Because even if you have resources, you could double down on someplace else you already are. How do you make those judgments?

Copy LinkHigh-pressure decisions about where to deploy resources

DR. NUTT: We are obviously under a tremendous amount of pressure to be everywhere all at once, and you can spread yourself too thin. We will look at it from a number of different perspectives. The first one is, do we have expertise in the region that would be added value in this context or are there other organizations that are already doing a fantastic job? Secondly, if it’s in the middle of a very acute crisis, we are not Doctors Without Borders. We are not the Red Cross. We do not have that level of infrastructure to be running food aid in. That is not what we do. We are a long-term recovery and rehabilitation organization, so we require a level of cooperation and local engagement for that to happen, and that’s very difficult to do while bombs are dropping.

The third piece of what we will look at is what is the relationship with, whether it’s the local government or local militia groups or whoever it is that you have to deal with, and can we operate safely and with a degree of autonomy and with the degree of accountability that we require? We won’t work in an area where we think that our resources are going to be redirected by terrorist organizations or we risk being infiltrated by terrorist organizations. So we will not commit to something if we don’t believe that we can meet our standards. That, for example, is one of the reasons why we’re not in Somalia right now. And there are other examples of that. So it’s a bunch of things.

SAFIAN: Sam is an intriguing mix of both extreme discipline as a leader and full-on passion. So how is she harnessing that right now to propel War Child in this time of turmoil? We’ll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, War Child’s Samantha Nutt talked about the rising perils for children and families in conflict zones. Now she explains how humanitarian aid can be most efficiently deployed and how the generosity of Americans for those in need overseas contrasts with recent pullbacks by the US government. Plus a personal story about two young women in Darfur that will tug at your heartstrings. Let’s jump back in. 

Copy LinkMaximizing impact through organizational strategy

War Child USA and War Child Canada are part of a wider War Child Federation. Each unit is pretty independent, as I understand it.

DR. NUTT: Entirely.

SAFIAN: Why not band together more? Wouldn’t that help fundraising and efficiency and impact and all of that?

DR. NUTT: And we do. We do. So as a loose federation, we will collaborate and cooperate and to the extent that we’re operating in the same parts of the world, then they will work together, our field teams. The reality is that the European arm tends to do a lot more advocacy. We are much more of the direct boots on the ground field organization. So when we say we have programs in Afghanistan, those are our programs in Afghanistan. If people want to give to our organization, we know exactly where all of those dollars are going and to whom and for what purpose and what the outcomes should be. What we have seen in other places is that you donate to one organization, they take an administrative overhead, then it gets transferred to their headquarters in Geneva, and then they take administrative overhead and then it gets to the field level and they take administrative overhead. And then they subcontract it out to us because we’re the direct field organization. And those dollars become pennies pretty fast, and that’s not how we want to operate.

SAFIAN: There’s so much chaos in our world right now. How would you advise others who feel a little bit overwhelmed by what’s going on and maybe sort of sometimes turn off themselves?

Copy LinkWhy individual generosity matters in global crises

DR. NUTT: The worst thing you can do is to shut yourself off from the world because it will only make those problems exponentially worse. When you start having the conversation and you start to understand that there are ways that you can be incredibly effective. It doesn’t take a lot of money to radically transform, whether it’s a child’s life or a family’s life or a woman’s life or a community’s life, in some of the most vulnerable places on earth. The amazing thing to me about the United States is that there isn’t usually an expectation the government will do things for you. There are other parts of the world where people don’t give because they’re like, “Well, that’s what my tax dollars go to pay for.” Right?

Americans are extremely generous, and I do think that for people who look at the collapse of USAID and think, “That doesn’t serve American interests throughout the world, that actually makes us more vulnerable to a whole bunch of different things.” Whether that’s acts of aggression or acts of terrorism or just declining US influence in the world, which has massive implications, not just economic implications, but other implications as well. I think that there are good people who then go, “Well, if the government’s not going to do that for us, we’re going to step in and we’re going to do that.” And you can feel like it’s a drop in the ocean, but when there are enough people doing this kind of thing, you can have a significant influence and that’s really important. But ultimately, you’re still moving along that path.

SAFIAN: It sounds like right now when the funding situation is so difficult, when organizations like War Child are being asked to step up and do more, what do you feel like is at stake right now for you, for War Child, for all of us?

DR. NUTT: The world is in a very unstable place, and I don’t think that that is a shocking statement or a surprising statement for many. We are seeing more violence, more conflict, more instability, more food insecurity. We are witnessing the worst displacement crisis since World War II with over 117 million people forced from their homes. All of that instability creates global pressures. It impacts us here at home in a number of ways, whether you’re talking about migration, whether you’re talking about disruptions to trade routes, for example, with the war in Yemen through the Red Sea, which is 30% of the world’s shipping containers go through the Red Sea there. And then you go and you’re trying to buy groceries and other things, and you’re wondering why they’re so much more expensive than they were a couple of years ago. Everything is interconnected and interrelated in that fashion.

And for us as an organization, we have been fortunate that despite, or maybe because of, what we are witnessing, that we have had great partnerships with foundations, with corporate partners, with other government funders, Canadian government and others, who are trying to step up. It will never replace the void of USAID’s withdrawal. Never, never. But hopefully that’s not permanent either. The one thing that war teaches you is that nothing is permanent. Everything that we have can change for better or for worse. And if we want to build strong democratic and inclusive societies, we have to invest in that, we have to maintain that, and we have to fund that.

SAFIAN: For folks who are listening to this as individuals, as organizations, if they want to support the work War Child is doing, what can they do?

DR. NUTT: Well, they can call us and we’ll have a conversation, but the website is warchildusa.org, and then they can also contact us through our various social media channels. If you have skills or expertise or you just want to learn more, please don’t hesitate to reach out because we would welcome the opportunity.

Copy LinkStories of resilience and hope amid conflict

SAFIAN: Yeah. One last question. Is there a story of any particular individual or family that sticks with you that sort of fuels you that you go back to?

DR. NUTT: I’ll give you the example of Darfur. Not too long ago. I was at the border between South Sudan and Sudan, and we had been on the ground in El Janina, which is in West Darfur, which was the epicenter of violence. And when I say violence, I mean horrific genocidal atrocities. We had been running for almost 20 years programming, educational programming, for kids. Again, catch-up learning, and we were running women’s literacy efforts. And so many years ago when we had first started, I was in one of those literacy centers and I was there and I struck up a conversation with a young woman. Her name was Nadia, and she was sitting on this mat on the sand, and she had her baby boy beside her. And she’d been attending our women’s literacy programming every evening. Like 70% of women in Darfur, she was functionally illiterate prior to starting this.

She’d been in her village and she was forced to flee because her husband and her father and her mother were gunned down right in front of her. And so there she was on this particular evening, and there are two parts to the story, because as I was talking to her, I was really struck by the enormity of the challenges that women like Nadia face. And when she had arrived in this camp, not only was she traumatized and alone, she couldn’t even take the few possessions that she had managed to scrounge and go into town and barter them for cash to buy supplies that she and her child needed because she couldn’t do the simplest mathematical equations. And so when I was talking to her in this particular evening, as I left, I said to her, “Nadia, has anything that we have done here actually helped you?”

And then she was sitting on this mat on the sand and it was very powerful, the first thing she did was she just leaned forward and she wrote her name. And then she said, “Now that I know how to write my own name, I’m going to learn how to write my son’s name. And so there I was in South Sudan just a few months ago and visiting one of the Darfurian makeshift refugee camps and our team pulls in and we’re there, and it’s all women and children, all of them. Many of them had seen all the male family members gunned down before fleeing. They were living in this burned down makeshift mosque with no electricity, no plumbing, starving. And as soon as we pulled in, this young girl comes running up to the car and she immediately says to me, she says, “I know War Child. I know War Child. I was in your program, your education program in El Janina,” which is the same place where I met Nadia.

And she said, “And I did your catch-up learning program. And then I went and I went to school and I went to medical school,” and she was very interested because I’m a doctor. And so we started talking about that, and she had just finished her last exams, but then the war broke out and she was forced to flee. And she didn’t know if her family members were still alive. She hadn’t been able to reach them. And as she’s sitting there looking at our team, she said, the last thing she said that day was, “I knew you wouldn’t forget us. I knew you would come.” And that’s what it’s all about. It is about being present in people’s lives when they need you the most, when the rest of the world has forgotten. It is about being consistent because nothing will ever change if we just allow the present to erase the progress of the past. And I think that we are very much at risk of doing that right now. And if that happens, we will all be living in a much more unstable and frightening world.

SAFIAN: Well, Sam, this was great and thank you so much for doing it. I really appreciate it.

DR. NUTT: Well, thank you for having me. Thank you.

SAFIAN: Sam’s lived perspective on the ground in some of the most challenging places on Earth gives her both clarity and perspective. It’s a reminder to all of us that larger realities are sometimes overlooked, that our priorities can be clouded by narrowness, and that we too often fail to appreciate the advantages that we have. Generosity isn’t simplistic altruism, it’s an active empathy and an investment in problem solving. That’s something every business and each of us should be inspired to embrace. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.