Bhutan

The United States and Bhutan cooperate on a number of initiatives. The U.S. Government annually brings several Bhutanese participants to the United States through its International Visitors, Humphrey Fellows, and Fulbright Programs. Bhutan participates in the South Asia Regional Initiative for Energy Integration (SARI/EI), a program funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) that helps enhance energy security in the region through cross-border power trade, clean energy development, including hydropower, and improved power market practices. The U.S. Government further deepened its energy partnership with the Royal Government of Bhutan through USAID’s South Asia Regional Energy Partnership (SAREP), which will support regional power trade. Bhutan also receives USAID-supported training on a range of disaster management topics as well as funding from USAID’s Global Health Bureau for COVAX vaccines and support for iodine nutrition projects. The United States Government provides support to Bhutan to fight COVID-19 and its economic impacts including creating livelihoods and enhancing food security for farmers in the agricultural sector. Since July 2021 the United States has donated over 600,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses to the people of Bhutan in partnership with COVAX. Bhutan receives State Department-supported assistance to implement programs to counter trafficking in persons and to support Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) programming. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Bhutan partnered on the Global Learning and Observation to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) project to train Bhutanese teachers on data collection and field-based Earth science.

Bhutan and the United States cooperate at a number of international organizations, including the United Nations, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank.