KPANDY TOWN —
Ezekiel Nwornee lies awake at night, the weight of his future pressing on him. After two years studying here at Grand Bassa University for his associate degree in primary education, he was looking forward to graduating next month. But the decision by United States President Donald Trump to end almost all US aid has put his degree out of reach.
Ezekiel is one of thousands of university students across Liberia whose scholarships in education have suddenly ended. Some like Ezekiel need just $US288 to pay their graduation fees before they're done. Now the 34-year-old is worried for the future of himself and his family.
"In Liberia right now, you know the economic crisis, and when the program came, I was very happy, but now I worry about the graduation fees," says Ezekiel who is the first person in his family to go to university. "If I can't join my friends on graduation day, it will break my heart."
Since the civil wars ended in 2003 the US has been the second-largest donor to Liberia after the World Bank (which also relies heavily on US funding). Education has been a key focus. The US has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on Liberia's education sector. Last year alone, USAID allocated more than $20 million - equivalent to almost 25 percent of the government education budget. (The government's education budget jumped to $115 million in 2025.)
Still, USAID's investments in Liberia's education sector have been questioned by critics who ask what return has come for those large investments. The education system remains one of the world's poorest performers by almost every measure. In one example, a final evaluation in 2021 of the $28 million USAID-backed Read Liberia project, implemented by US-based RTI International, found : "teachers' uptake of the program in classroom instruction is poor. The cause of any program impact on reading levels is thus likely to lie outside the classroom rather than resulting from improved practices in classrooms."
In 2024, Jarso Maley Jallah, Minister of Education in the incoming Boakai administration, reported that more than 6,000 of Liberia's teachers were volunteers - making as little as $20 a month - responsible for teaching 1.3 million students. Of those, only one in every four had tertiary teacher training. In some counties there was only one teacher for every 90 students.
Critics have worried that without government funding to hire graduates of the USAID program, trained teachers may be forced to move out of the profession. Minister Jallah has prioritized moving trained teachers from volunteer positions and onto the government payroll, so they came commit to professional teaching careers.
Ezekiel and his classmates were to be some of those trained teachers. They were part of a five-year $20 million USAID-backed program, also run by RTI International and known by the acronym TESTS, that was designed to put 3500 volunteer teachers through tertiary programs by 2026.
The end of the program has hit students across eight universities and college in five counties: The University of Liberia, Africa Methodist Episcopal University, Lofa County University, Grand Bassa University, LICOSESS College of Education, Cuttington University, Adventist University of West Africa, and Nimba University.
Very few of the students say they will be able to pay the outstanding fees. Emmanuel Moore, a 25-year-old student at Cuttington Junior College in Kakata, Margibi County, is now scrambling to find the $463 a semester that USAID had been covering.
"I don't know where to start," Moore says. "We were depending on USAID to help us, and now we don't even know how to continue our education. Many of us can't even pay the initial 15 percent of the tuition fees to start classes."
Here are Grand Bassa University the cuts have had an immediate impact. Nearly 140 students on this campus alone have had their courses cut short. Almost all of them are already teaching, with almost no formal training. The teaching faculty are worried.
One leader of the USAID project who asked for anonymity because the Trump administration has told them not to speak to the press, says enrollment in the education department here at Grand Bassa University had never exceeded 50 students, but with the USAID program, the department had more than 200 students. He said the cuts would be devastating to Liberia's future.
"Without USAID, we will lose the opportunity to train the next generation of educators," agrees Dominic Bah, Acting Dean of the College of Education at Grand Bassa University.
Teachers say Liberia's schoolchildren will be the big losers.
"I've been in the teaching field for over a decade, but this program has taught me new strategies, ways of teaching I never knew before," says Ezekiel.
I've been in the teaching field for over a decade, but this program has taught me new strategies, ways of teaching I never knew before," says Ezekiel.
32-year-old Shirley Michaels, a single mother of three, agrees that her studies have made her a better teacher, especially for Liberia's many students with special needs.
"To be real, to do lesson planning, classroom management, it was USAID that brought this to my knowledge," she says. "USAID even taught us how to do inclusive learning, for example, you get the child, the child cannot hear good, or the child is blind, and you say, 'We have to find another school for them, so they alone can go there'. USAID says 'No'. They gave us strategies to teach all of them together in the same classroom with those who can hear and see, and they will learn, and they will feel proud, and they will not feel segregated."
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Liberia's Ministry of Education responded to a request for comment by saying that it was not yet ready to make a statement on how the government will respond to USAID's cuts including the TESTS project.
Emmanuel Gweh, Director of Communication at the National Commission on Higher Education, says the Commission stands in solidarity with the affected students, but has no funds to assist. Gweh says they too are affected because two of their staff who were undergoing training in Nigeria have been laid off because of the cuts.
"It is sad for Liberia, but the NCHE cannot do anything about it," she says.
Meanwhile students have taken to social media begging for support to help them get to the end of their degrees and become well-qualified teachers, able to lift the futures of their students.
This story was a collaboration with New Narratives as part of the Investigating Liberia Project. Funding was provided by the Swedish Embassy in Liberia. The funder had no say in the story's content.
