If the year 2025 has had a message for developing countries, it’s this: “You’re on your own.”

Most notably, the Trump administration began with an unprecedented and ongoing assault on foreign aid, including global health programs. But there have been further ill omens.

Other rich countries, including the UK and France, followed the US example by cutting their own aid programs as well. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s tariff campaign has hit poor countries that had been achieving export-driven growth, like Bangladesh, especially hard.

If there’s a silver lining for the Global South, it’s that being on their own in 2025 means something very different than what it meant in, say, 1990. Countries where poverty was once near-universal, like India or Indonesia, are now considered middle-income. Some populous countries in sub-Saharan Africa, like Kenya or Nigeria, are, if not completely politically stable, now possessed of enough real state capacity to try ambitious projects like universal health coverage.

The resources available to these nations are still highly limited by rich-world standards. But they’re still enough to achieve very impressive feats, and I recently heard of an intriguing project that could serve as a perfect test case.

If it works, it could show that major international health projects, saving hundreds of thousands of lives, can be funded largely by the countries they’re meant to help, rather than by forces of philanthropy and foreign aid that have suddenly become unreliable.

Neonatal sepsis: When babies’ infections go very, very badly

It’s called NeoTest.

The program targets an extremely common and preventable cause of death in young infants: neonatal sepsis. Sepsis is a catch-all term for infections that provoke an overwhelming immune response, damaging internal organs, and in the worst cases, leading to death. Sepsis can in principle be caused by anything — a virus, a fungus, a protozoa — but in practice, most infants who get it get it from........

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