By: Rebecka Lundgren, Holly Baker, Lotus McDougal
2025 has brought turmoil, change, distress, loss, and small glimpses of hope. We have not yet shared our experiences widely, out of shock, fear, and uncertainty. Today, we come together to begin to tell our story, from a place of mourning, gratitude, and hope. Seven months ago, we were – respectively – the Project Director, Technical Director for Research, and Technical Director for Measurement of Agency for All, a groundbreaking flagship social and behavior change cooperative research project funded by USAID.
This project was a first in many ways. USAID staff designed the project to center agency, choice, and opportunity, rather than externally set health targets. As the prime recipient, we at the Center on Gender Equity and Health at UC San Diego gathered 12 organizations from around the world with a range of expertise in a research consortium that strove to center our work in equitable partnerships and local leadership.
We built those partnerships through nearly three years of intensive work together, building a broad research portfolio designed to understand and support agency in many communities around the world. At the time of termination, we were:
- Working to ensure that women in India were treated with dignity and respect during childbirth and could access healthcare free from coercion.
- Amplifying the voices of communities in Cameroon, Kenya, and India as they described their own agency—a foundational step toward designing programs that truly meet their needs.
- Supporting efforts in Niger to foster more equitable gender roles, enabling women and men to make decisions that lead to healthier, more prosperous families.
- Addressing the crippling stigma faced by people experiencing infertility in Cameroon and Kenya, with the goal of strengthening their ability to act on their reproductive choices.
- Helping to build agency among Kenyan youth to navigate relationships without violence and to pursue their life goals.
- Working to understand and measure community perspectives on contraceptive use in Cameroon and Kenya, to help shape family planning programs grounded in the realities and needs of women and men—rather than the priorities of researchers and funders.
Our project termination was abrupt and unethical. We were forced to halt surveys in the middle of data collection, resulting in incomplete information with diminished value and comprising the contribution of community members who had generously shared their time and experiences with us.
We discontinued programs in the middle of implementation, leaving participants without results or lessons. Research that could have advanced our collective ability to strengthen agency and health in communities around the world was cut short.
Agency for All’s termination carried deep personal costs for us, for our partners, and for the communities in which we were working. We extracted staff in countries around the world who had been stranded. We spent months navigating administrative hurdles just to secure payment for work completed before the project was halted. We also undertook the difficult task of formally closing relationships and contracts with partners we had come to respect and care for, both professionally and personally.
We watched as colleagues, including our own staff, lost their jobs, and faced tremendous organizational contraction. Promising professional trajectories – particularly of emerging researchers around the world – are now at best uncertain.
The losses resulting from this termination have been profound. We have been working to pick up the pieces of our research, our staff, our careers, and our sense of purpose. Over the last seven months, we have witnessed the dissolution of many of the structures and values that drew us to this work. Yet, despite this loss, we have also seen tremendous strength, resilience, compassion, and solidarity that continue to give us hope.
We move forward with optimism, knowing that even in the face of disruption, new possibilities can take root. Recently, we each received pivot grants from the UC San Diego School of Medicine, made possible through the generous support of the Prebys Foundation. These funds will allow us to complete some of the valuable work and lessons interrupted by the project’s termination. We are deeply grateful for this recognition and support, which will enable us to begin building a renewed legacy of impact. Continuing this work is a meaningful step toward regaining our own agency to advance more ethical, compassionate, and effective social and behavior change programs.
__
If you would like to learn more about the Agency for All work that was impacted by this termination, please visit the Agency for All Website or Agency for All LinkedIn.
