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Carisa Lee

HIV and AIDS stake­hold­ers say the re­cent de­ci­sion by the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca to freeze its for­eign aid for 90 days shows just how vul­ner­a­ble civ­il so­ci­ety groups are in the hands of ex­ter­nal part­ners.

On Jan­u­ary 20, the ad­min­is­tra­tion of US Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump de­cid­ed to freeze all for­eign as­sis­tance, in­clud­ing for the Pres­i­dent’s Emer­gency Plan for AIDS Re­lief (PEP­FAR), which sup­ports the achieve­ment of epi­dem­ic con­trol and sus­tain­able re­sponse in T&T and four oth­er Caribbean coun­tries—Ja­maica, Guyana, Suri­name, and Bar­ba­dos.