Aid Cuts Hit Ethiopia’s Malnourished Children, Jeopardizing Life-Saving Response

22 April 2025 — At a crowded health post in northern Ethiopia, Belaynesh Berihu cradles tiny daughter Eldana, as a health worker slips a coloured tape around the infant’s arm to gauge malnourishment.

“She eats very little, she doesn’t have an appetite,” says Berihu, whose daughter weighed less than 2 kg at birth. Berihu, too, is painfully thin – surviving on a diet of mostly wheat and teff-based bread.

She is still recovering from months of imprisonment by an armed group. Today, the 25-year-old mother doesn’t have enough milk to nurse her baby.

Like millions of children across Ethiopia, seven-month-old Eldana has been diagnosed with malnutrition.

Berihu’s next stop is to collect packages of World Food Programme (WFP)-supported nutrient-packed peanut paste for her daughter, before heading home.

But stocks of nutritious commodities are running dangerously low, and WFP’s nutrition support may soon dry up for lack of money.

Facing a massive funding shortfall for our Ethiopia operations, WFP may be forced to deeply cut assistance to millions of people in the coming weeks – even as malnutrition and hunger are set to rise from a mix of shocks.

“The situation has become untenable, and WFP has no other choice but to cut life-saving support,” says Zlatan Milišić, WFP Country Director in Ethiopia, noting our 2025 budget for the country is expected to be just over half of last year’s.

“We are already reducing our footprint and stretching our resources as far as we can,” Milišić adds.

“Millions of Ethiopians are one shock away from falling into a catastrophe. We need a swift and generous donor response to ensure the country’s most vulnerable people get the assistance they need.”

Without immediate funding, 3.6 million people will lose access to critical WFP food and nutrition relief. Among them: 650,000 malnourished children, along with pregnant and breastfeeding mothers like Berihu.

Hundreds of thousands of refugees also risk losing vital aid.

The funding shortfall comes at a time of multiple crises. Ongoing conflict, regional instability, displacement, weather extremes and economic shocks have left 10 million people facing hunger and malnutrition across Ethiopia.

“The economic problem is the biggest problem,” says Berihu, who – like her husband – is unemployed.

Today, she and her daughter share a small, cement house with other family members in the town of Endabaguna, in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray Region. Her husband is living in another district while looking for work.

She remembers a better life helping out on her parents’ farm and business, as well as studying. “Our livelihood was good then,” Berihu recalls.

That was before an armed group arrived in her village, she says, looting grain and livestock. Villagers were rounded up and held captive for months in another region, fighting hunger and malaria during their confinement.

“We are still being treated for our physical health,” Berihu says.

Daily struggle

Further south in Ethiopia’s Amhara Region, Hayat Abate too is recovering from the scars of a two-year-long conflict that “took away our livelihoods, our families and everything we had,” she says.

Her one-year-old daughter, Lihan Ali Hassen, is also being treated for malnutrition, at a health post in the town of Dessie.

“Raising my children is a difficult journey,” says Abate, who has five other offspring. “As a mother, you don’t want your children to be hungry, you want them to survive and have a good future. But here it is a difficult life.”

“This area is prone to drought and the communities living here struggle daily to make ends meet,” says Dessie area health extension worker Hassen, who juggles a caseload of more than 800 malnourished women and young children.

Dessie is among thousands of tiny health posts countrywide supported by WFP. Our assistance – including a raft of specialized nutrient-rich food supplements for malnourished women and children – is part of a broader, national strategy spearheaded by the Government and humanitarian partners.

It includes monthly screenings and educational campaigns targeting mothers, to prevent malnutrition and encourage healthy lifestyles.

Without sustainable funding for WFP’s hunger and malnutrition-fighting efforts, a vital component of the strategy is at risk.

“These are practical tools for mothers, looking at personal and family hygiene, eating fresh foods and in variety, and making better decisions for nutrition security,” health worker Aisha Hassen says.

Clad in a grey headscarf and crisp white coat, she gives a health class to a group of women one morning, showing them how to measure their children for malnutrition by using a multicoloured ribbon to calculate the mid-upper arm circumference.

“We love coming to the health post,” says Abate of women like herself who are regulars. “We bring coffee and discuss on many issues about how to keep ourselves healthy, how to take care of our children and many more lessons.”

“The biggest lesson for us here,” Abate adds, “is the saying ‘A mother is her child’s first doctor.’ We are now learning to take better care of our children.”

Nutrition Funding Emergencies Ethiopia

*SOURCE: World Food Programme. Go to ORIGINAL: https://www.wfp.org/stories/aid-cuts-hit-ethiopias-malnourished-children-jeopardizing-life-saving-response 2025 Human Wrongs Watch