Forbes Cites Helen Keller's Nigeria Work as Example of Nutrition Funding Cuts Threatening 369,000 Children's Lives
In a new article for Forbes, Daphne Ewing-Chow warns that government cuts to nutrition funding could lead to the death of hundreds of thousands of children this year alone.
These alarming findings come from a report analyzing the impacts of aid cuts published in the journal Nature. The report found that reductions in USAID funding will lead to an additional 163,500 child deaths annually due to the loss of malnutrition treatment programs. When factoring in all announced cuts to foreign aid, this figure rises to 369,000 additional child deaths per year.
“Tools like the delivery of essential vitamins and nutrients, climate-smart agriculture, and the screening and treatment of malnutrition have the power to significantly reduce malnutrition,” says Helen Keller CEO and President Sarah Bouchie. “However, the suspension of funding threatens our progress.”
The Forbes article highlights Helen Keller’s terminated nutrition program in Nigeria, which served 5.6 million children, as one example of these harmful cuts. In total, 21 million people across the countries we serve—many of them young children—are now at increased risk of severe malnutrition due to reductions in US Government funding.
Ewing-Chow writes that the disruption of this work in Nigeria illustrates one instance of the dire consequences of the USAID cuts, but notes, “it’s only one thread in a broader unraveling of the global nutrition safety net.”
Read the full article in Forbes.
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