Science: Cuts to Helen Keller's Nutrition Work in Nepal Threaten Children's Lives
Science Magazine’s latest cover story spotlights the devastating consequences children in Nepal are facing because of US funding cuts to nutrition work. The article also highlights Helen Keller Intl’s remarkable legacy of improving health and wellbeing for families across the country.
For nearly four decades, Helen Keller has worked to improve nutrition for children and families in Nepal through smart, cost-effective interventions like promoting nutrient-rich, orange-fleshed sweet potato farming, supporting breastfeeding, and community screening of acute malnutrition.
Until January 2025, Helen Keller served as the prime implementing partner for a USAID-funded, multi-year project to reduce child malnutrition across Nepal’s seven provinces. Globally, a lack of proper nutrition is connected to roughly half of deaths in children under age five, and, in Nepal, about 25% of children are stunted because of widespread food insecurity.
Helen Keller partnered with local organizations and thousands of community health heroes to deliver a suite of nutrition interventions. Their collective efforts were paying off: over the last three decades, rates of child malnutrition in Nepal have continued to drop. But that progress was upended by the US government’s cuts to this and thousands of other life-saving global health initiatives.
Reporting from Kathmandu and Lumbini province, journalist Catherine Offord documents the human toll of these cuts: families with malnourished children suddenly cut off from treatment, therapeutic food, and trained health workers.
The program “had a direct impact on the lives of many children,” says Chandrakala Sigdel, a nutrition facilitator in rural Lumbini. But now, “the number of malnourished children is likely to rise, and in the long run, this could push the entire nation back into the cycle of malnutrition. … That truly upsets me.”
Families will “fall through the cracks,” warns Helen Keller’s Nepal Country Director Pooja Pandey Rana. “In the end, it’s always the most vulnerable women and children that suffer.”
Globally, experts estimate nutrition cuts will result in 163,500 additional child deaths annually.
“It’s not just Nepal,” Pooja adds. “Everywhere, this crisis is happening.”
