African nations are increasingly balking at attempts made by the Trump administration to bring Global South countries into alignment with western mores, this time using health care as the carrot, a new report by Human Rights Watch charges.
At issue is the aptly-named America First Global Health Strategy, a policy issued by the State Department in September 2025, as the Trump administration was moving away from an aid-based approach to development assistance and to a market-based “transactional” approach. In the months since then, the AFGHS carrot had over 30, mostly African countries as signers.
First exposed by Substack blogger Emily Bass in November 2025, was that the AFGHS contained explicit clauses which would give almost Palantir-level access to the data, “rights” which would last far beyond the duration of the MoUs. While the signed MoUs had a duration of five years, the data-access rights would persist for 25 years. In addition, AFGHP signers gave the US control of all new pathogens discovered in that time, with no specified benefits (vaccines) in return. In December, over 50 NGOs, led by Oxfam in Africa, sent a letter to all African heads of state, warning them not to sign the US-proposed version of the MoU.
