Through the plight of one woman trying to save her daughter from starvation, “Rovina’s Choice” traces the effects of Donald Trump’s executive order banning US foreign aid - made within hours of being sworn into office in January 2025. Rovina Naboi’s devastating story represents the global impact of that decision on the world’s most vulnerable populations, and how it stopped decades of progress combating severe malnutrition.
With President Trump’s decision to cancel the funding for USAID’s overseas projects, this documentary takes us to meet Rovina in the camp in Kenya where she lives with her nine children and many others in a similarly subsistence situation. Now the question might be asked at this point. Why ought the American taxpayer be subsiding a woman with nine kids on the other side of the world? And I’m guessing that the administration is hoping that most of the people who do ask that question will consider domestic expenditure more judicious, but as you watch this young woman struggle with daily decisions that truly are life and death, you ought not to be able to help feeling that the sums being spent are a sort of national equivalent to our buying a latte from Starbucks. There is true poverty here - borne out of climate conditions and lack of opportunity. Rovina isn’t a lazy woman, nor is she uneducated, but with no father around to help with the family and the nearest medical facility a fourteen kilometre walk away she hasn’t her problems to seek as she tries to find work and time. Contributors include former USAID management who rather bluntly describe just how much worse the health regimes in countries like Kenya have become since this money dried up. Malnutrition and infant mortality rates are sky-rocketing and the ever-present HIV is a constant threat in this, one of the more stable democracies in Africa. Even from a purely self-serving perspective, it makes little sense for the USA (and other commonwealth nations like the UK which is also shrinking it’s aid budget) to be scaling back assistance when at the same time China is expanding it’s global sphere of influence with an ostensible benevolence. Rovina is a symbol of just how beneficial help can and needs to be, but without it the spiral back into a kind of want that might make Dickens blush looks worryingly inevitable.
