U.S. Says It Wants Trade, Not Aid, in Africa. Cuts Threaten Both.

Commuters in Abidjan, one of West Africa’s largest cities, joke that it is impossible to run two errands a day because of traffic. A new overpass on the way to the airport could make their journeys smoother. About 120,000 vehicles will move through it every day, according to the Ivorian agency overseeing its construction.

For years, as the work continued, a billboard told Ivorians who made it possible: “Financed by the American people.” But they are not so sure of that promise anymore. The billboard was removed earlier this year because President Trump has gutted U.S. foreign aid, leaving large infrastructure projects financed by the United States facing an uncertain future.

Now, construction workers in Abidjan are rushing to complete the overpass before the Trump administration turns off the funding. It is a sign of how African investors and government leaders, as well as drivers, are adapting to the new U.S. strategy on the continent.

The United States is not so much in a financing mood. It wants deals.

“Trade, not aid, is now the pillar of our policy in Africa,” Troy Fitrell, the State Department’s top Africa official, said in a speech last week at a business summit in Abidjan. Minutes after he finished speaking, U.S. and Ivorian companies signed more than half a dozen deals, including to supply drones for agriculture and mining, and scanning systems for border monitoring.

Mr. Trump has broken with the terms that defined decades of U.S. involvement in Africa: He has shrunk the U.S. Agency for International Development, imposed tariffs that threaten a free-trade mechanism with dozens of African countries, and rolled back anti-corruption standards for American companies doing business with foreign partners.

The Trump administration has also begun dismantling a little-known agency established by Congress in 2004 that finances the overpass in Ivory Coast and dozens of large infrastructure projects in a short list of countries. These include projects to expand electricity grids, build roads or increase women’s employment in places such as Indonesia, Nepal and Senegal.