By AFP
The United Nations warned Tuesday that the global aid funding crisis could be paid in children’s lives in Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh, unless sustainable funds emerge fast.
US President Donald Trump imposed a freeze on foreign aid in January pending a review, sending shockwaves through the humanitarian community.
Huge numbers of the persecuted and stateless Rohingya community live in squalid relief camps in Bangladesh, most having arrived after fleeing a 2017 military crackdown in neighbouring Myanmar.
Successive aid cuts have already caused severe hardship among Rohingya in the overcrowded settlements, who are reliant on aid and suffer from rampant malnutrition.
The UN International Children’s Emergency Fund said youngsters in the camps were experiencing the worst levels of malnutrition since 2017, with admissions for severe malnutrition treatment up 27 percent in February compared with the same months in 2024.
Following the foreign aid review, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Monday that Washington was cancelling 83pc of programmes at the US Agency for International Development.
“An aid funding crisis risks becoming a child survival crisis,” Ms Rana Flowers, UNICEF’s representative in Bangladesh, told journalists in Geneva, speaking from Dhaka.
“More than 500,000 children live in the camps of Cox’s Bazar. Over 15 percent are now malnourished – an emergency threshold,” she said.
“Any further reductions in humanitarian support risk pushing families into extreme desperation.”
“There’s no substitute for the scale of support provided by the donor governments and there’s no replacement for the valuable partnership with the United States,” she said.
“UNICEF is determined to stay and deliver for children – but we need help. Without the guarantees of sustained funding, our life-saving humanitarian services, they’re at risk. And the price is going to be paid in children’s lives.”
Flowers said UNICEF had received a US humanitarian waiver for its programme for treating children with severe acute malnutrition – but needed funding to make it work, and it is on course to run out of money in June.
The cancelled US grants for Bangladesh “are equivalent to about a quarter of our Rohingya refugee response costs in 2024”, she said.
Trump’s cost-cutter-in-chief, tech billionaire Elon Musk, insisted last week on X, which he owns, that “no one has died as a result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding. No one”.
Rights grants cut
Other UN agencies detailed how the US funding shake-up had affected their operations.
The US was the top voluntary contributor to the UN Human Rights Office in 2024, contributing US$36 million, around 13.5pc of such income, which accounted for 61pc of the office’s funding in 2023.
The agency said it had received termination letters for its US State Department grants for ongoing projects in Equatorial Guinea, Iraq and Ukraine, and for two USAID grants – on Colombia and the Voluntary Fund for Indigenous Peoples.
“There has been an immediate impact. In Iraq we’re shutting down a programme funded by the US which involved working with torture victims and families of disappeared persons,” spokeswoman Ms Ravina Shamdasani said.
“We’re trying to reduce costs where possible. There are some countries where we will have to cut back on some of our work.”
