This year, a global development lender debarred a vendor and its chief executive for at least five years after finding them responsible for fraudulent and obstructive practices in a donor-funded digitization project.

A private contractor built a flagship citizen services platform with donor funding, then transferred it to the state “completely and unconditionally,” making the state the new owner of the digital infrastructure.

The 2026 State Department Fiscal Transparency Report, released this week, evaluated 139 governments and one entity against a single, publicly stated bar: are budget documents genuinely public, complete, and reliable, and are natural resource extraction contracts awarded through a transparent process. Seventy-three governments met that bar. Kenya was one of them, named alongside Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa, and Ghana. Many others across the assessment did not.

On a Ugandan president's remarks about the moon, and the pattern underneath them.

In November 2025, Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni made international headlines with a striking claim: outer space, he argued, is common property, and no African country currently has a presence there to show for it. Nations with established space programs, he said, hold a structural advantage over those without one — an advantage he described in vivid, unsettling terms, comparing the position of space-absent nations to that of a population watched from above by those with the power to decide its fate.

What's worth sitting with is a smaller phrase, almost thrown away in the middle of the same remarks: the “old gunpowder problem all over again.”

For years, the argument for one integrated health system instead of four separate vertical ones — one for HIV, one for TB, one for malaria, one for polio, each with its own staff, its own supply chain, its own data system — has been a case we made to donors. It was, more often than not, a values argument: fragmentation wastes a nurse's time, confuses patients, and stops governments from seeing their own health system whole.

That argument no longer needs to be made from values alone. The U.S. Department of State's own 2025 global health strategy now states it as settled fact and stated policy.

I did not grow up trusting deals like this one.

My grandfather worked land that produced copper his country never got to smell, let alone sell. The concession was signed decades before he was born, by men who never saw the mine, for a company that shipped the raw ore out through a port built specifically to move it faster. By the time anyone thought to ask what my country actually earned from what came out of that ground, the company had already renegotiated the terms twice, and the answer had already stopped mattering to anyone but us.

Most organizations in this field will tell a government they are working to become unnecessary. Few funders have ever said, in writing, that the industry's actual incentives point the other way.

The U.S. Department of State's 2025 global health strategy does. It states plainly that many implementing organizations “have perverse incentives to self-perpetuate rather than work towards turning functions over to local governments,” and that despite three consecutive presidential administrations setting strategies aimed at local ownership, progress on that goal has been minimal — not, the strategy is careful to note, for lack of willingness on the part of recipient governments, but because of how the funding system itself is built.

Measuring progress toward local ownership, month by month.

The BAROSmeter tracks one thing: how close African health systems are to running without us. Every month, we publish one issue — a single argument, a field story, or a hard look at what's changing in global health financing. Read our first issue and subscribe below to get the next one directly.