GENEVA, Switzerland: The UN’s Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on Friday said the suspension of US funding has already affected millions of children worldwide.
On his first day back in office last month, US President Donald Trump called for a 90-day freeze on all US foreign aid, giving his administration time to assess international spending and focus on cutting programs that don’t align with his “America First” agenda.
On Wednesday, the State Department revealed that multi-year aid contracts would be reduced by 92 percent, aiming to save around $60 billion in development and humanitarian programs abroad.
“We have received termination notices for UNICEF grants, and they include humanitarian as well as development programming,” the agency’s spokesman James Elder said at a press conference in Geneva.
“We continue to assess the impact of those termination notices on our programmes for children. But we already know that the initial pause has impacted programming for millions of children in roughly half the countries where we work.
“Without urgent action, without funding, more children are going to suffer malnutrition. Fewer will have access to education, and preventable illnesses will claim more lives,” he said.
“So it’s very clear that reduction in any funding during these exceedingly difficult times for children is putting child lives at risk at a time when they need support more than ever.”
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The United States has, until now, been by far the world’s largest donor of humanitarian and development aid.
Impact on Haiti
Geetanjali Narayan, UNICEF’s representative in Haiti, during the briefing, said that US aid plays a critical role in the lives of children in the Caribbean’s poorest country.
The current situation is having a devastating impact on thousands of children at the moment in Haiti. We are seeing services are being cut, reduced,” she said.
“The impact in Haiti — in a country that is so stricken by conflict, violence and poverty — is extreme and it’s immediate: it is happening now.”
“These activities will no longer be able to continue,” she said.
Impacts on South Africa
The suspension of US funding for South Africa’s HIV/AIDS programmes could result in more than 500,000 deaths over the next decade, the head of the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation said on Thursday.
“We will see lives lost,” the foundation’s chief operating officer Linda-Gail Bekker told reporters after South African groups were notified that their USAID grants had been cancelled.
“In excess of half a million unnecessary deaths will occur because of the loss of the funding, and up to a half a million new infections,” Bekker said, citing studies modelling the potential impact of the funding cuts.
South Africa has one of the highest rates of HIV in the world, with around 13 percent of the population or 7.8 million people HIV positive, according to government data.
