"After a 6 week review we are officially cancelling 83% of the programs at USAID. The 5200 contracts that are now cancelled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States."
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: the abrupt halt of development and emergency projects — even those already under contract — virtually overnight
A short post, dense with underlying messages: it speaks to taxpayers (and voters), reassuring them that their tax money is finally being safeguarded. In just two hundred characters, it distills a long-standing negative narrative: that for decades, the vast majority of billions spent on international cooperation by civil society organizations, UN agencies, and other actors fighting hunger, poverty, promoting global health, human 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, just to mention one of countless examples. On January 20, public development aid lost its top global donor — one unlikely to be replaced. While the medium- and long-term impact of this decision is still being measured — amid cuts, suspensions, partial project restarts, and legal disputes — a war of narratives is underway.
On one side, a tough, defiant narrative prevails: finally, the humanitarian circus and the hypocrisy of a self-perpetuating system that never truly changed lives have been brought to an end. In fact, it only fueled dependency, handouts, or corruption. Mixing ideology and falsehoods with a few inconvenient truths, 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 blow, development actors are realizing they don’t know how to speak the language of Rubio’s taxpayer. The usual sentimental storytelling — focused on heartwarming success stories of project beneficiaries — fails to break out of the bubble of those who already understand that helping the vulnerable is the bare minimum of human solidarity. They already know that either we all make it, or none of us do. They already understand that being a migrant, refugee, sick, poor, or hungry is neither a fault nor a life sentence.
Thus, everyone is somewhat in search of new oracles, of a new narrative — as if hunting for a treasure island. We embark, once again, on the path of “reinventing the narrative” (as U.S. platforms call it), a phrase that has been cyclically recurring in sector debates since at least the early 2010s.
In 2014, a study titled The Narrative Project, produced by Weber Shandwick for major international organizations, aimed to find new language to describe the future of global development and cooperation and counter declining public support for issues like poverty reduction (back when Trump was not even on the horizon). The project involved linguists, researchers, politicians, and opinion leaders who identified words to avoid and others to promote, such as autonomy, partnership, shared values, and progress, emphasizing their expressive power. They argued that empowerment should replace “fighting poverty,” as the latter irritated skeptics.
In 2015, the Italian website InfoCooperazione picked up this research and pondered how to manage the media’s tendency to highlight failure and waste over success stories, and how to communicate change to an increasingly undecided public. The article concluded with a set of commandments: avoid the word aid, reject pity-driven narratives, do not minimize the problem of corruption, steer clear of long timeframes, and refrain from justifying cooperation with arguments of national security or anti-immigration.
The impression today is that we are still stuck at that point, if not worse: scrambling for salvific words that will not trigger accusations of endorsing “woke” ideology, rewording has become the sector’s mantra: do not say climate change, say pollution; avoid mentioning diversity, equity, inclusion, or risk having your projects shut down. Supporters of rewording justify it as follows: we’re still doing the same things, we’re just calling them by different, more acceptable names. It’s merely a matter of verbal camouflage — changing the packaging to protect the substance. Clever? Perhaps. 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 facts, in the robustness of methods, in emerging evidence and numbers, in the impact of given approaches, in 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 to say it. The right words will come naturally.
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This article was published by Vita.it on April 28, 2025.