LEEDS, United Kingdom — Central Africa is home to some of the world’s most valuable natural resources, including the Congo Basin rainforest, vast mineral reserves and fertile agricultural land. Despite this wealth, millions of people across the region continue to face poverty, displacement and food insecurity. Countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the Central African Republic (CAR), Chad, Cameroon and the Republic of the Congo have experienced conflict, environmental degradation and economic instability for decades.
According to UNHCR, West and Central Africa hosted approximately 12.7 million forcibly displaced people as of mid-2025, including 8.2 million internally displaced people and 2.9 million refugees and asylum-seekers. The figure represented a 48% increase since 2020, and UNHCR has since reported that displacement across the region has continued to climb.
For three decades, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was the primary channel through which the U.S. government supported environmental conservation, humanitarian assistance, food security and economic development in Central Africa. That changed in 2025: the Trump administration moved to eliminate roughly 80% of USAID’s global programs, and on July 1, 2025, USAID was formally merged into the U.S. Department of State, ending its 64-year run as an independent agency. Nearly all USAID staff were laid off, and responsibility for the agency’s remaining humanitarian and development work shifted to the State Department. The USAID programs in the Central Africa region described below reflect USAID’s work in the region prior to this restructuring; where their current status is known, it is noted.
Protecting the Congo Basin Through CARPE
One of the most significant USAID programs in the Central Africa region was the Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE). Launched in 1995, CARPE worked to conserve the Congo Basin rainforest, the second-largest tropical rainforest in the world after the Amazon, and grew to become USAID’s largest environmental program on the continent.
According to the World Wildlife Fund, the Congo Basin holds more than 70% of Africa’s tropical forests and supports the livelihoods of more than 75 million people, while also functioning as one of the world’s most important carbon sinks.
CARPE took a community-based approach to conservation and poverty reduction, working through local institutions to strengthen forest governance and reduce pressure on natural resources. In the Salonga Landscape of the DRC, CARPE invested more than $20 million since 2006 to support park protection, ecological monitoring, efforts to combat wildlife crime and community livelihood projects, implemented through a consortium of partners including the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Pact. Conservation groups have reported that USAID’s 2025 funding cuts disrupted projects across the continent, including in the Congo Basin, leaving CARPE’s future scope uncertain.
Humanitarian Assistance Remains a Priority
Before its dismantlement, humanitarian assistance made up one of the largest components of USAID’s work in Central Africa. Ongoing conflict and displacement created urgent needs for food, health care, clean water and shelter across the region.
In fiscal year 2023, USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (USAID/BHA) provided more than $788 million in multi-sector humanitarian assistance to seven countries across Central Africa. That funding supported food assistance and emergency response items for internally displaced people, refugees and host communities; access to basic health care and protection services; and relief commodities, shelter support, and water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) programs for populations affected by conflict and climate shocks.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has experienced one of the world’s largest displacement crises, and USAID/BHA identified it as one of the primary recipients of this assistance. Since the 2025 restructuring, some humanitarian functions have transferred to the State Department, while USAID’s long-running Food for Peace emergency food program the largest of its kind in the world was moved to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, an agency without USAID’s crisis-response infrastructure. Reporting in mid-2026 found that the revamped program was reaching fewer of the countries closest to famine.
Addressing Food Insecurity and Malnutrition
Food insecurity remains an urgent, ongoing challenge in Central Africa. Conflict, extreme weather and economic instability have disrupted agricultural production and limited access to food for millions of people.
The World Food Programme (WFP) projects that approximately 26.5 million people in the DRC will face crisis-level food insecurity or worse by early 2026, with the crisis most severe in North Kivu, South Kivu, Ituri and Tanganyika.
One of the largest USAID activities addressing this need was the Title II Emergency Food Program, administered through USAID’s Food for Peace office, which supplied U.S.-grown food commodities to food-insecure populations. In 2023, USAID allocated $120.8 million to the DRC through this and related programs, and working alongside the World Food Programme, reached approximately 4.4 million people with food assistance. USAID also funded Resilience Food Security Activities in the DRC and neighboring Uganda; in FY 2023 alone, USAID/BHA provided nearly $61 million for these early-recovery and resilience programs, which worked to improve nutrition outcomes and help households withstand future shocks.
As noted above, the Food for Peace program was transferred to the USDA in 2025 following USAID’s dismantlement, and its current reach in Central Africa is narrower than under USAID.
Supporting Economic Growth and Poverty Reduction
Long-term economic development was another pillar of USAID’s work in Central Africa. Because most households rely on agriculture and natural resources for income, USAID prioritized sustainable, broad-based economic growth as a tool for poverty reduction.
One example was USAID’s Feed the Future initiative, the U.S. government’s flagship global hunger and food security program, which included the DRC among its priority countries and worked to boost agricultural productivity, strengthen market systems and expand smallholder farmers’ access to training and resources. In the Central African Republic specifically, USAID signed a five-year, roughly $22 million development agreement with the CAR government in 2020 aimed at expanding licit economic opportunity, addressing drivers of conflict and shifting the country from primarily receiving emergency relief toward more sustainable development investment.
According to the World Bank, approximately 65.7% of the population in the Central African Republic was living below the international extreme poverty line of $2.15 per day as of the most recent household survey, making it one of the poorest countries in the world. The World Bank has specifically noted that poverty in CAR, already extremely high at around 71%, “may worsen following the planned withdrawal of USAID:” a direct illustration of how central USAID’s economic development role had become to the country’s stability.
A More Resilient Future for Central Africa
Central Africa continues to face significant challenges, including displacement, food insecurity and environmental degradation and the 2025 dismantlement of USAID has made the path forward considerably less certain. Conservation initiatives, humanitarian assistance and economic development programs helped communities build a more stable future for three decades, but much of that infrastructure has now been disrupted, and it remains unclear how much of it the State Department will sustain going forward.
Much of USAID’s Congo Basin work was carried out not directly by the agency, but through a small group of long-running implementing partners. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF), founded in 1961, has worked in the Congo Basin for decades on protected-area management and anti-poaching efforts, including as a lead co-manager of Salonga National Park alongside the DRC’s Congolese Institute for Nature Conservation. The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), founded in 1895, has operated in the Republic of Congo and DRC for years, supporting park rangers and biodiversity monitoring in national parks such as Nouabalé-Ndoki and Conkouati-Douli in partnership with national forestry ministries.
Pact, a Washington, D.C. based development organization founded in 1971, has focused on community livelihoods, natural resource governance and anti-corruption work in the Congo Basin, helping local communities benefit economically from conservation rather than being displaced by it. All three organizations received CARPE funding as part of the Congo Basin Forest Partnership, a coalition of governments, NGOs and regional institutions established in 2002 to coordinate conservation across Central Africa’s forest countries.
Looking Ahead
With future funding of USAID programs in the Central Africa region uncertain, these implementing partners along with other international donors, will likely need to fill a larger share of the gap if the region’s conservation and poverty-reduction gains of the past three decades are to be sustained.
– Srinidhi Madhavan
Srinidhi is based in Leeds, UK and focuses on Business and Politics for The Borgen Project.
Photo: Flickr