UN says aid drying up for malnourished children due to funding cuts
GENEVA: Dramatic global aid cuts are creating a 'child survival crisis,' the UN said Friday, warning that treatment would soon run out for over a million severely malnourished children in Nigeria and Ethiopia alone.
The United Nations children's agency decried the dire consequences for children globally of the recent sudden cuts to aid by the United States — traditionally the world's largest donor — and other countries.
'Even a brief halt of UNICEF's critical life-saving activities risks the lives of millions of children at a time when needs are already acute,' UNICEF's deputy chief Kitty van der Heijden told reporters in Geneva, speaking from Nigeria.
Humanitarian organizations worldwide have been reeling since Donald Trump decided to freeze nearly all US foreign aid funding after his return to the US presidency in January.
Van der Heijden said she had this week seen firsthand the consequences of the 'sharp decline in funding support for our lifesaving work' during visits to Ethiopia's northern Afar region and the Maiduguri region in northeastern Nigeria.
'Due to funding gaps in both countries, nearly 1.3 million children under five suffering from severe acute malnutrition could lose access to treatment over the course of the year, leaving them at heightened risk of death,' she warned.
'Without these critical interventions, children's lives are in peril,' she said, pointing out that only seven out of 30 mobile health and nutrition units that UNICEF supports in Afar were currently operational.
'This is a direct result of the global funding crisis,' she said.
Without fresh funding, van der Heijden warned that UNICEF was on track to quickly run out of so-called Ready-to-Use-Therapeutic-Food (RUTF) used to treat children suffering from severe wasting.
The stocks would be depleted in May in Ethiopia, where an estimated 74,500 children require treatment each month, she said.
And in Nigeria, where 80,000 children require such treatment each month, the agency risked running out of the supplies 'sometime between this month and the end of May,' she said.
'This funding crisis risks (becoming) a child survival crisis that is totally preventable.'
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