WFP forced to halt food aid for 650,000 women, children in Ethiopia

By AFP

The World Food Programme said Tuesday that it was suspending aid for 650,000 malnourished women and children in Ethiopia because of a lack of funding.

The UN agency warned they were among 3.6 million people in Ethiopia who would no longer have access to food aid in the coming weeks without urgent new funding.

"WFP is being forced to halt treatment for 650,000 malnourished women and children in May due to insufficient funding," it said in a statement.

"WFP had planned to reach two million mothers and children with life-saving nutrition assistance in 2025," it added.

The WFP, like other aid agencies, has been caught in the crosshairs of funding cuts by US President Donald Trump, who signed an executive order freezing all foreign aid for three months shortly after his inauguration in January.

It comes as several Western countries have also reduced aid spending.

More than 10 million people are facing hunger in the east African country of around 130 million, the UN agency said.

Ethiopia is still recovering from a brutal civil war between federal forces and rebels in the northern region of Tigray between November 2020 and November 2022 that killed at least 600,000 people.

Around one million people -- a sixth of Tigray's population -- are still displaced.

There are also ongoing armed conflicts in Ethiopia's two most populous regions, Amhara and Oromia, that have displaced hundreds of thousands.

The WFP warned that the violence was disrupting humanitarian operations, restricting its ability to "reach over half a million vulnerable people in the region".

Ethiopia is also seeing a surge of refugees from neighbouring Sudan, gripped by civil war since April 2023, and South Sudan, long marred by instability.

The WFP added that cash and food assistance for up to one million refugees would also stop in June "if additional funding is not received and the number of people fleeing violence in South Sudan continues".

Ethiopia, a landlocked country in the Horn of Africa, is also facing intense drought, particularly in its Somali region on the border with Somalia.

Funding shortfall

Amid the growing needs, the WFP said it was facing a shortfall of $222 million for the April-September period in Ethiopia.

"I think this is an important time to remind the world and our donors and others that the humanitarian situation in Ethiopia is not very good, and it's actually going to deteriorate," Zlatan Milisic, a WFP country director, told AFP.

Last week, the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said development assistance was already dropping worldwide before the USAID cuts.

It said aid fell by 7.1 percent between 2023 and 2024, the first decline in six years, as several countries slashed their budgets.