UK aid cuts will decimate the fight against malnutrition – leaving millions at risk across Africa
Around a year and a half after the birth of her daughter Ereng, Lomanat, 39, became extremely worried about the toddler's health. She seemed an unhealthy weight, often crying as a result of hunger, but the family - which includes dad Daniel, 40, and son Mzee, 8 - were unable to give her the food that she needed.
Life had become hard after recent droughts in the area of Northern Kenya where they live killed off all of the 40 goats they kept for food and to sell. The family no longer had a sustainable income or reliable food source, and now make most of their money by burning wood to make charcoal to sell.
'My child was in very bad shape,' Lomanat says of Ereng. 'She was malnourished.'
Lomanat was able to walk two miles in the heat to a clinic, which supplied her with nutritional treatment for Ereng, in the form of a chocolate-flavoured fortified peanut paste. 'My child started gaining weight and gaining weight, until I saw that the baby became alive again,' says Lomanat. 'I am very happy, because she is cured.'
The support that Ereng received was funded by Save the Children – but the charity is now warning that aid cuts are putting their nutrition programmes at risk.
Specifically, in a new analysis shared exclusively with The Independent, the charity is warning that slashing the budget will lead to UK nutrition support – which helps treat people with malnutrition in the form of peanut paste or corn-soy porridge – being slashed by nearly 90 per cent.
The 'best case' modelled scenario shows nutrition support dropping from being able to support 10.8 million people in 2019 to just 1.1 million in 2027.
The prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, said in February that the UK would cut foreign aid from 0.5 per cent to 0.3 per cent of Gross National Income (GNI) from 2027, in order to help pay for increased defence spending. According to the most recent forecasts for GNI, this is set to reduce the aid budget from £15.4 to £9.2 billion by the 2027/8 financial year.
Researcher Richard Watts says that Save the Children can predict the expected squeeze on certain aid programmes due to the number of already-existing commitments that have been made with UK foreign aid all the way to 2027/8.
Indeed, current commitments for 2027/8 already exceed the budget ceiling, according to Watts. The fact that the government has pledged to support five priority areas - Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza, climate crisis and multilateral organisations - also means there are expected to be particularly large cuts to other programmes, and significantly reduced support to the world's poorest.
It comes after reporting from The Independent that millions of people in Somalia could be at risk of acute hunger and food shortages thanks to Donald Trump's own extreme cuts to international aid.
Callum Northcote, head of hunger and nutrition at Save the Children UK, describes the projection as a 'significant setback' to the UK's work tackling hunger.
"Half the world's children are unable to afford a healthy diet and against a backdrop of escalating food insecurity worldwide and the growing threat of the climate crisis, the situation is likely to get worse,' he says.
Malnourishment is a global problem that is already largely unsolved: More than four of five children with acute malnutrition do not receive nutrition support as a result of bureaucracy or a lack of funding, according to the International Rescue Committee charity.
The climate crisis will compound the impact of these cuts as it increasingly puts crops and other farming under pressure through droughts and other extreme weather.
Growth stunting, or being too short for your age, and wasting – children too thin for their height as a the result of recent rapid weight loss or the failure to gain weight – are two of the most severe impacts of malnutrition.
Modeling from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a US-based health research group, suggests that if no action is taken on climate change, between 2024 and 2050 there will be an additional 40 million children stunted and 28 million children wasting.
Those figures come on top of the 148 million children that experienced stunting and 45 million children that experienced wasting in 2023, according to the World Health Organisation.
In response to the modelling of UK aid cuts on future nutrition support, a spokesperson for FCDO told The Independent: 'Detailed decisions on how the ODA [overseas development aid] budget will be used will be worked through as part of the ongoing Spending Review process, based on various factors including impact assessments.
'We will be taking a rigorous approach to ensuring all ODA delivers value for money.'
The UK Spending Review, which is set to reveal multi-year spending plans for government departments, is ongoing, and will be finalised in June.
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