Impact of the USA's foreign aid obliteration?

General talk
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Over the past decade, a substantial fraction of Openstreetmap activity in developing countries (mapathons, HOT projects, YouthMappers chapter support, imagery access via USAID GeoCenter, microgrants, coordinated campaigns, and hardware donations) was at least indirectly underwritten by USA funding, primarily through USAID, the State Department’s MapGive programme, Peace Corps, and PEPFAR’s geospatial initiatives.

That pipeline has effectively been severed since early 2025. The OECD projects a 9-17% drop in net official development assistance in 2025, with sub-Saharan Africa potentially facing a 16–28% bilateral ODA decline, on top of the specific dismantling of USAID structures that HOT explicitly depended on. HOT itself acknowledged in February 2025 that USAID had been a “critical partner” throughout its existence.

Yet a cursory look at contribution data does not show obvious decline in mapping activity in the most affected regions. My intuition says there should be one, or at least a leading indicator. Am I missing something, or has Openstreetmap activity in the developing world become more structurally independent of USA funding than I assumed ?

A few hypotheses I can think of that might explain the absence of a visible effect, and which people here can probably test or refute better than I can:

1. The lag is real and the effect hasn’t hit yet. Projects funded in 2024 may still be executing on committed budgets through 2025. The HOT regional hubs (ESA, WNA) were substantially capitalised through the Audacious Project’s multi-year grant from 2020, and community momentum built over a decade does not disappear overnight.

2. OSM activity was never as dependent on US money as the institutional framing suggested. Much of the actual editing was volunteer-driven or university-chapter-driven, with USA money providing coordination, training and imagery access that do not directly drive activity.

3. Corporate mapping may have partially substituted. Since 2016, major corporations such as Apple, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon have made substantial OSM contributions globally, though total corporate edit volume has been declining since 2021 - so this is a weakening buffer rather than a growing one.

4. The effect is real but not yet legible in aggregate statistics. The cuts may be felt in programme pipelines (fewer new projects launched, fewer microgrants issued, fewer mapathons organised) rather than in raw edit counts, which are a lagging and blunt indicator.

Has anyone actually tried to measure this ? Are there community members who can report from the ground on whether funded project activity has visibly dropped since early 2025 ?

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This is a very interesting topic, it is a pity that nobody has replied thus far.

Are there any HOT admins who could kindly give some response on the situation, some sort of FOIA request option to reach out to them?

As for the data crunching, perhaps geospatial academics might be interested in doing some sort of analysis, e.g. @pitscheplatsch who has done a lot of analysis on OSM users with his ResultMaps blog articles.

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People involved with HOT and YouthMappers are reachable by various means including OSM communication channels. FOIA would be not only unnecessarily adversarial but also probably irrelevant these days. The really neat thing about OSM is that you don’t always need to go through layers of bureaucracy just to talk to people. You just have to navigate our bazillion communication channels.

The other day, I asked around and managed to connect with people from both groups. There was some interest in responding, but understand that it’s an awkward thread to dive into because it started out with a lot of speculation.

For what it’s worth, the funding changes are challenging for many groups, but people on the ground believe in what they’re doing. I ran into YouthMappers chapter organizers at last fall’s State of the Map Latam. Through a language barrier, I came away with the impression that they’re realistic about the funding situation and determined to find a way forward. Kind of reminds me of a community group I’m involved with that also saw its institutional support go away suddenly a few years ago.

The overall YouthMappers program is now a charter project of OpenStreetMap U.S. It’s obviously a different kind of institutional umbrella than the State Department, but hopefully a more familiar one to this community.

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In my own database, I continue to focus only on keeping information about paid mappers up to date. I do not directly collect details about HOT or YouthMappers activities.

If you have any ideas, I would be happy to support you, for example by answering questions like: “How have contributions with hashtag XY developed over the past 12, 24, or more months?” This could also be broken down to the country or regional level.

As mentioned, analyzing hashtags in the changesets should, in this case, already provide at least a rough picture of the development.

Hope this helps.

Best regards,
Pascal

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Hi, this is Rebecca from HOT. Someone shared this thread in the HOT Slack so I thought I’d chip in.

The tl;dr is: our current funding wasn’t really affected, but our pathways for future funding were.

HOT’s funding was affected by USAID closure, but only by a couple of percent. It affected us mainly in two ways:

  • Current work: We had some projects where USAID funding was cut (though were already nearing a close), and we also had some upcoming funding that was cut (though fortunately the project hadn’t actually started yet). We were a sub grantee on a few contracts, where the prime was able to find alternate funding, so this greatly reduced our initial expected loss to just a couple of per cent after a few months.
  • Future work: as you noted, HOT’s funding had been largely made up of Audacious funders 2020-2025. Building up our US Government funding was one of our goals for 2026-27. The closure of USAID means that we are redirecting these efforts towards other institutions. Of course, the sector is much more competitive now, which is a challenge.

I can only comment on the HOT side, there are several other mapping groups (YouthMappers, potentially OSM US) which I think had stronger ties to USAID funds, and so might have different stories to tell.

Thanks for the dialogue, and grateful for ideas and perspectives.

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Hi Jean-Marc,

Thank you for raising this topic. I was with the USAID GeoCenter from 2020-2025 and was a member of the team that managed USAID funding for YouthMappers. Over the past year, I’ve dedicated my master’s thesis to studying the impacts of the USAID funding cuts on the YouthMappers network. I’ve leveraged a mixed methods approach: I’m conducting a quantitative analysis of YouthMappers’ OSM activity levels and editing contributions from 2015-2025, and I facilitated interviews and focus groups with YouthMappers in Latin America and the Caribbean.

I’m not yet at a point where I can share all of my findings publicly, but I will be defending my thesis next month and hope to present the results at a State of the Map and/or FOSS4G conference later this year. I’ll also return to this thread once I can share more. For now, I can say that many of the hypotheses you raised align closely with the questions I’ve been exploring. For instance, my preliminary analysis suggests that there may be a lag between funding shocks and observable changes in editing activity. I am also seeing substantial regional variation in chapters’ activity levels following the USAID cuts.

Just a note, I am not formally a member of the YouthMappers leadership team anymore and am not speaking on their behalf, but I’ve coordinated with them throughout my research and let them know that I would be commenting here.

Thank you again for starting this important conversation!

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