Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.

The highlights this week: Pushback mounts over the Trump administration’s health aid deals in Africa, Gaza’s Rafah crossing with Egypt is set to reopen, and the United Kingdom pauses legislation to ratify its Chagos Islands deal with Mauritius.

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.

The highlights this week: Pushback mounts over the Trump administration’s health aid deals in Africa, Gaza’s Rafah crossing with Egypt is set to reopen, and the United Kingdom pauses legislation to ratify its Chagos Islands deal with Mauritius.

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As U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has inked $11 billion in health agreements with more than 15 African countries in recent weeks, it is facing increased pushback on the continent, especially in Nigeria and Kenya.

In Nigeria, the bilateral deal—whereby the United States has committed $2.1 billion in health aid over five years—is drawing significant backlash across the political spectrum. This has centered on the agreement’s emphasis, in the U.S. State Department’s words, on “promoting Christian faith-based health care providers.”

“Healthcare is a core public good that must remain neutral, inclusive, and universally accessible,” Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi, a member of the African Democratic Congress, a Nigerian opposition party, said last week. Nigeria’s population is roughly split between the predominantly Christian south and predominantly Muslim north.

In December, Kenya’s High Court halted the implementation of a similar aid deal with the United States, pending a legal review over data privacy concerns and a lack of public and parliamentary consultation.

The five-year agreement would see Washington provide $1.6 billion in aid for treatments for HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases in Kenya. In turn, Nairobi would commit $850 million to pay health workers and move toward becoming independent of aid.

The deal was temporarily suspended after more than 50 rights groups raised concerns that it could potentially give the U.S. government direct access to sensitive personal medical records, compared with the anonymized data used for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which the new deal seeks to replace.

Civil society organizations........

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