UN says aid drying up for malnourished children due to funding cuts

By AFP/Nina LARSON

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 organisations 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) to treat children suffering from severe wasting.

'Totally preventable'

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.

Van der Heijden highlighted the "significant progress" made towards tackling the global childhood malnutrition crisis in the past quarter century.

"Since the year 2000, the number of stunted children has decreased by 55 million, or one third," she said, pointing out that UNICEF and its partners last year reached 441 million children under five globally with malnutrition prevention assistance.

A full 9.3 million of them received treatment for severe wasting and others forms of severe acute malnutrition, according to the agency.

"Today, those hard-earned gains are being rolled back," van der Heijden said.

She said the problem was not only the quantity of the reductions, but "how they have been made, in some cases, suddenly and without warning, leaving us with no time to mitigate their impact on our programmes for children".

"The funding crisis goes far beyond Ethiopia and Nigeria," she said.

"This is happening around the world, and the most vulnerable children are bearing the brunt."

UNICEF estimates that more than 213 million children across 146 counties and territories will require humanitarian assistance in 2025.

"This funding crisis risks (becoming) a child survival crisis that is totally preventable," van der Heijden said.

"We should not allow the global community to fail children in this way."