Aid cuts could be paid in children’s lives in Rohingya camps: UN

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 children’s agency UNICEF 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 83 percent of programmes at the US Agency for International Development (USAID).“An aid funding crisis risks becoming a child survival crisis,” 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 cutOther UN agencies detailed how the US funding shake-up had affected their operations.The United States was the top voluntary contributor to the UN Human Rights Office in 2024, contributing $36 million, around 13.5 percent of such income, which accounted for 61 percent 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 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.”

Aid cuts could be paid in children’s lives in Rohingya camps: UN

Over 15 percent of the more than 500,000 children sheltering in camps in Bangladesh are already malnourished, according to UN children’s agency UNICEF

Subscribe for full access

After 100 days of ‘civilian’ rule, Myanmar remains a bastion of oppression

‘We cannot write as before’: Women poets of Myanmar’s Spring Revolution

Sent to die: Myanmar’s conscripts caught between a junta’s war and a nation’s collapse

Magway emerges as key front in junta’s strategy to claw back control of western Myanmar

Subscribe for full access

Related Articles

ASEAN envoy meets Myanmar junta, ethnic armed groups in Thailand as NUG questions exclusion

Russian troops, Myanmar junta forces hold small-scale joint military exercise in Naypyitaw

Associates of resistance leader questioned following his escape from NUG custody

ASEAN ministers push stalled peace plan in Myanmar talks