“After a six-week review, we are officially canceling 83% of USAID programs. The 5,200 contracts that have now been terminated have spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve (and in some cases even harmed) U.S. interests.” With this bombastic statement, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X last March 10, sounding triumphantly satisfied. He was celebrating a major goal finally achieved: halting development and emergency projects, already under contract, overnight.
A short post, dense with underlying messages: it speaks to the taxpayer (a taxpayer = a vote), reassuring them that their tax money is finally being safeguarded. In just two hundred characters, it condenses a longstanding negative narrative, that for decades, the vast majority of billions spent on international cooperation by civil society organizations, UN agencies, and various other actors working on goals like fighting hunger and poverty, promoting global health, and defending rights, democracy, and freedom of expression, has been wasted.
But the real implication of that tweet is devastating: millions of people around the world are no longer receiving, and will not receive, previously promised aid. Too many will pay with their lives for the suspension of antiretroviral drug distribution (to mention just one of countless examples). On January 20, public development aid lost its top global donor, one that is unlikely to be replaced. While the medium- and long-term impact of this decision is still being measured, amid cuts, suspensions, restarts of partial projects, and legal disputes, a war of narratives is underway.
On one side, there is a tough, proud narrative: finally, the humanitarian circus and the hypocrisy of a self-perpetuating system that failed to truly change lives has come to an end, in fact, it only sustained dependence, handouts, or corruption. Mixing ideology and falsehoods with a few actual facts, this narrative is injecting massive doses of poison into the veins of international relations, poison that will be difficult to purge.
On the other side, communication is scattered and confused. Stunned by the heavy blow, actors in the cooperation field are realizing they don’t know how to speak the language of Rubio’s taxpayer. The usual sentimental storytelling, centered on heartwarming success stories of project beneficiaries, does not break out of the bubble inhabited by people who already know that helping the vulnerable is the bare minimum of human solidarity. They already understand that either we all make it or none of us do; they already know that being a migrant, refugee, sick, poor, or hungry is neither a fault nor a lifelong destiny.
So, everyone is somewhat in search of oracles and a new narrative, as if searching for a treasure island. We set out on the path of reinventing a narrative (as U.S. websites call it), an expression that has been cyclically recurring in sector platforms since at least the 2010s.
In 2014, a study titled The Narrative Project, produced by the Weber Shandwick agency on behalf of major international organizations, aimed to find new language to describe the future of global development and cooperation and counter the public’s declining support for issues like poverty reduction (eleven years ago, when Trump was still far off). The project involved linguists, researchers, politicians, and opinion leaders who identified words to avoid and those to promote, like autonomy, partnership, shared values, and progress, for their expressive power. Empowerment, they argued, should replace “fight against poverty,” which irritated skeptics.
In 2015, InfoCooperazione picked up this research and questioned how to handle the media’s tendency to highlight failure and waste over successes, and how to communicate change to an increasingly undecided public. The article ended with a set of commandments, including: do not use the word aid, avoid pity narratives, do not minimize the problem of corruption, avoid referencing long timeframes, and do not justify cooperation on the basis of national security or anti-immigration goals.
The impression today is that we are still stuck at that point, if not worse: scrambling for salvific words that will not trigger criticism from those who might label projects as expressions of the enemy “Woke” ideology. Rewording is the sector’s mantra in recent weeks: do not say climate change, say pollution; do not mention diversity, equity, or inclusion, or your projects might be shut down. Supporters of rewording explain it like this: we are doing the same things, we are just calling them by different (more acceptable) names. It is just a matter of verbal coverage, changing the packaging to save the substance. It may seem clever, but it borders on coercion.
As if words were not facts themselves, as if words did not hold creative power. Treating words as mere packaging is a dangerous trap. Of course, we must use them carefully, but pure technique or narrative marketing cannot keep us safe.
There is a deeper level: we must stay rooted in the reality of our work, in the facts, the robustness of the methods used, the evidence and numbers that emerge, the impact of a given approach, the measured and evaluated results intertwined with the authentic stories of those who experienced them. Only the hard truth of reality can counter the sludge of toxic and false narratives.
This is why we need honest storytelling, free from stereotypes (whether feel-good or neocolonial), guilt, or persecution complexes, stories told by the protagonists themselves, not necessarily shaped to fit donor frameworks, but valued for what they truly are, including their challenges and flaws.
Those who implement projects to shelter refugees, support migrants, bring street children back to school, or feed the hungry cannot be at the mercy of pro-and-con opinion battles, because they are dealing with real, concrete experiences, not abstractions. It is from this narrative capital that we must always restart, whenever there is a need to reinvent narratives, by knowing it, being aware of it, and committing to it
We need to dive even deeper into reality, to extract the essential and say it, just say it. The right words will come naturally.
Subscribe to AVSI newsletter
Sign up to receive news and information on our work in the world.
This article was published by Vita.it on April 28, 2025.