Here’s what we learned about pro-democracy efforts in Zimbabwe.
Over the past two months, U.S. foreign assistance has experienced unprecedented uncertainty. President Donald Trump unilaterally paused all foreign assistance for a 90-day review period beginning Jan. 20, 2025, and has sought to permanently dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The gutting of U.S. foreign assistance will hardly make a dent in annual federal spending, but will likely have drastic effects on America’s position in the world in the coming years. In addition to reputational damage, this pause is likely to make the world less secure by undermining the direct effect of these programs on aid beneficiaries.
For decades, USAID has funded pro-democracy interventions in countries around the world that the U.S. government deemed important for global security and democratic advancement. I have worked on such programs in Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Afghanistan. Practitioners involved in these programs have identified social cohesion and trust as critical to the resolution of conflicts and advancement of democracy.
For the past two years, I’ve conducted research on the direct impacts of international development projects like those funded by USAID. For example, I recently completed research examining whether community interventions in violence-affected areas can build trust and societal cohesion. We modeled the interventions after USAID pro-democracy interventions and, thus, evaluating their impact gives us a sense of the impact of the pro-democracy interventions supported until recently by USAID. I conducted this research in Zimbabwe, where communities have often experienced intense political violence. I found that simple, inexpensive community interventions designed and supported by foreign donors can have important societal benefits that are linked to both strengthening democracy and reducing future conflict.
How I studied the impact of USAID-like community interventions
In 2022, I worked with two established nonprofit organizations that implement USAID-funded projects throughout Zimbabwe, a country with a long history of political violence and government repression. Our goal was to examine whether the impact of these organizations could be rigorously evaluated. Together, we selected 12 communities throughout Zimbabwe where we would use experimental methods to measure the impact of pro-democracy interventions. Ahead of elections scheduled for August 2023, the government of Zimbabwe was cracking down on nongovernmental and civil society organizations. The government enacted a set of bills designed to close the civic space. Violence and efforts to intimidate opposition groups and activists also were on the rise.
We divided the 12 communities in our study into four groups. The first group received an existing intervention previously funded by USAID. This intervention involved a multi-day event bringing together survivors of political violence to process their trauma in a collective setting. A second group received a second, newly created intervention, where community members came together to identify shared values and goals. We included this newly created community values intervention in order to test whether merely being exposed to an intervention might be the cause of changes in trust, rather than the content of the intervention. A third group received both the USAID-style intervention as well as the community values intervention., The last group served as a “control” group, and received no intervention.
Before we started the interventions, we collected baseline surveys to measure social trust and engagement among residents in all 12 communities. After the interventions, we returned to collect updated data on some of the same measures of social trust and engagement.
More specifically, we collected four measures of social trust. First, we measured “general trust,” by asking research participants to report whether they trusted most other Zimbabweans. We also measured perceived trust within one’s community, trust in one’s co-ethnics – those who share the same ethnicity – and trust in people who don’t share one’s ethnicity. In addition to asking about trust, we asked respondents to rate their levels of fear in various places, including their home, their place of work, the market, and their place of worship.
To measure the impact of the different interventions, we compared whether these indicators of social trust and feelings of fear improved in the communities that received USAID-like interventions, vs. to the communities in the other groups.
Effective interventions can build social trust and reduce fear
Our results provide strong evidence that USAID-style interventions can build social trust, even in communities that have experienced high levels of politically motivated violence. Given the timing of the study – which took place at a contentious time immediately preceding an election – the research team was not surprised to see all four measures of social trust decline over the study period. But as social trust declined more generally in Zimbabwe during this period, we found that social trust improved in the communities that received the USAID-style intervention. Research participants in the communities with the intervention that brought together survivors of political violence to process their trauma in a collective setting reported substantially higher levels of trust in other Zimbabweans within their community, as well as higher trust in both their ethnic ingroup and outgroup.
Other communities, in contrast, did not demonstrate such an increase. In communities that received our civic values intervention, we found a significant drop in the level of fear that respondents reported on – from feeling afraid in one’s home, to the markets, to the workplace.
These results provide optimism about the ability of USAID and other foreign assistance programs to directly contribute to improving social conditions – trust, in this case – in communities that have experienced substantial violence. Moreover, while respondents in our “placebo” treatment did not demonstrate improved trust, they did demonstrate substantially reduced levels of fear within their own communities. Such interventions can have a significant impact in the societal cohesion of communities at risk.
What this means for the future of USAID and foreign assistance
The Trump administration’s attacks on foreign assistance and USAID has relied on selectively – and in some cases, inaccurately – picking project expenditures that they deem to be unworthy of funding. In the weeks and months ahead, critics of that approach will likely focus on how gutting foreign assistance will decrease U.S. soft power. But it’s also important to recognize that effective foreign assistance has meaningful direct impacts on the world that can help reduce long-term need for outside assistance.
Jacob S. Lewis is an assistant professor at Washington State University’s School of Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs. His research focuses on social movements, African politics, and trust-building in post-conflict regions.
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