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.”
UN says aid drying up for malnourished children due to funding cuts
https://arab.news/znp6e
UN says aid drying up for malnourished children due to funding cuts
- “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,” van der Heijden said
- She said she had this week seen firsthand the consequences of the “sharp decline in funding support for our lifesaving work“
Bolivia and Israel to restore ties severed over the war in Gaza
- Paz's government eased visa restrictions on American and Israeli travelers last month
- The Bolivian foreign ministry said its top diplomat would meet his Israeli counterpart in Washington later Tuesday to discuss the revival of bilateral ties
LA PAZ, Bolivia: Bolivia's new right-wing government said Tuesday that it would restore diplomatic relations with Israel, the latest sign of the dramatic geopolitical realignment underway in the South American country that was once among the most vocal critics of Israeli policies toward Palestinians.
The Bolivian foreign ministry said its top diplomat would meet his Israeli counterpart in Washington later Tuesday to discuss the revival of bilateral ties, which Bolivia's previous left-wing government severed two years ago over Israel's devastating campaign against Hamas in Gaza.
Bolivia said the effort came as part of a new foreign policy strategy under conservative President Rodrigo Paz aimed at “rebuilding Bolivia's international prestige, opening new economic opportunities and strengthening alliances that directly benefit the country and our citizens abroad."
Bolivian Foreign Minister Fernando Aramayo is in the midst of a whirlwind trip to Washington for meetings with American officials as his government works to warm long-chilly relations with the United States and unravel nearly two decades of hard-line, anti-Western policies under the Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS, party that left Bolivia economically isolated and diplomatically allied with China, Russia and Venezuela.
Paz's government eased visa restrictions on American and Israeli travelers last month.
In announcing his expected meeting with Aramayo on Monday, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar thanked Bolivia for scrapping Israeli visa controls and said he spoke to Paz after the center-right senator's Oct. 19 election victory to express “Israel’s desire to open a new chapter” in relations with Bolivia.
Paz entered office last month, ending the dominance of the MAS party founded by Evo Morales, the charismatic former coca-growing union leader who became Bolivia's first Indigenous president in 2006. Not long after taking power, Morales sent Israel's ambassador packing and cozied up to Iran over their shared enmity toward the U.S. and Israel.
When protests over Morales' disputed 2019 reelection prompted him to resign under pressure from the military, a right-wing interim government took over and restored full diplomatic relations with the U.S. and Israel as it sought to undo many of Morales’ popular policies.
But 2020 elections brought the MAS party back to power with the presidency of Luis Arce, who in 2023 once again cut ties with Israel in protest over its military actions in Gaza.
Other left-wing Latin American countries, like Chile and Colombia, soon made similar moves, recalling their ambassadors and joining South Africa’s genocide case against Israel before the United Nations’ highest judicial body.
