An organization working on atrocity prevention went from 50 to 20 staff members due to the U.S. aid cuts limiting capacity for early warning and prevention.

Date: 6/26

Region: Africa

Country: Multi-country

Topic: Peacebuilding & Stabilization

Policy Lens: Security & Resilience

Entry Type: Operational Impact

Additional Context: This information was collected as part of The Aid Report’s original reporting, “A US-funded atrocity prevention system is going dark.” This feature story examines how local peacebuilders warn that remote communities in Central Africa are becoming harder to reach — and harder to protect.

Invisible Children reported these impacts across headquarters and teams in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sudan. Their atrocity prevention programs, which have since been terminated and scaled down, included early warning and emergency response systems addressing intercommunal violence and threats from armed groups, as well as a reunification program connecting children and youth who had been abducted by groups, such as the Lord's Resistance Army, or LRA, back to their families, often across borders. While some activities have been continued with unrestricted funding from private donors, the termination or non-renewal of USAID and State department grants to these projects have reduced field operations at a time when questions about the reemergence of the LRA, a Ugandan militant group led by Joseph Kony, are starting to be discussed.

Source: Devex