US aid kept many hungry Somali children alive. Now that money is disappearing

MOGADISHU, Somalia — The cries of distressed children filled the ward for the severely malnourished. Among the patients was 1-year-old Maka’il Mohamed. Doctors pressed his chest in a desperate attempt to support his breathing.

His father brought him too late to a hospital in Somalia ‘s capital, Mogadishu. The victim of complications related to malnutrition, the boy did not survive.

‘‘Are you certain? Did he really die?’’ the father, Mohamed Ma’ow, asked a doctor, shocked.

The death earlier this month at Banadir Hospital captured the agony of a growing number of Somalis who are unable to feed their children — and that of health workers who are seeing hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. support disappear under the Trump administration.

The U.S. Agency for International Development once provided 65% of Somalia’s foreign aid, according to Dr. Abdiqani Sheikh Omar, the former director general of the Ministry of Health and now a government advisor.

Now USAID is being dismantled. And in Somalia, dozens of centers treating the hungry are closing. They have been crucial in a country described as having one of the world’s most fragile health systems as it wrestles with decades of insecurity.

Save the Children, the largest non-governmental provider of health and nutrition services to children in Somalia, said the lives of 55,000 children will be at risk by June as it closes 121 nutrition centers it can no longer fund.

Aid cuts mean that 11% more children are expected to be severely malnourished than in the previous year, Save the Children said.

Somalia has long faced food insecurity because of climate shocks like drought. But aid groups and Somalis alike now fear a catastrophe.

Former Somali Foreign Minister Ahmed Moalin told state-run TV last month that USAID had provided $1 billion in funding for Somalia in fiscal year 2023, with a similar amount expected for 2024.

Much of that funding is now gone.

A U.S. State Department spokesperson in a statement to the AP said ‘‘several lifesaving USAID humanitarian assistance programs are active in Somalia, including programs that provide food and nutrition assistance to children," and they were working to make sure the programs continue when such aid transitions to the State Department on July 1.

The problem, aid workers say, is the U.S. hasn’t made clear what programs are lifesaving, or whether whatever funding is left will continue after July 1.

The aid group CARE has warned that 4.6 million people in Somalia are projected to face severe hunger by June, an uptick of hundreds of thousands of people from forecasts before the aid cuts.

The effects are felt in rural areas and in Mogadishu, where over 800,000 displaced people shelter. Camps for them are ubiquitous in the city’s suburbs, but many of their centers for feeding the hungry are now closing.

Some people still go to the closed centers and hope that help will come.

Mogadishu residents said they suffer, too.

Ma’ow, the bereaved father, is a tailor. He said he had been unable recently to provide three meals a day for his family of six. His wife had no breast milk for Maka’il, whose malnutrition deteriorated between multiple trips to the hospital.

Doctors confirmed that malnutrition was the primary factor in Maka’il’s decline.

The nutrition center at Banadir Hospital where Ma’ow family had been receiving food assistance is run by Alight Africa, a local partner for the U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF, and one that has lost funding.

The funding cuts have left UNICEF’s partners unable to provide lifesaving support, including therapeutic supplies and supplemental nutrition at a time when 15% of Somali children are acutely malnourished, said Simon Karanja, a regional UNICEF official.

One Alight Africa worker, Abdullahi Hassan, confirmed that the group had to close all their nutrition centers in several districts of Mogadishu. One nutrition project supervisor for the group, Said Abdullahi Hassan, said closures have caused, ‘‘tragically, the deaths of some children.’’

Without the food assistance they had taken for granted, many Somalis are seeing their children waste away.

More than 500 malnourished children were admitted to the center for malnourished children at Banadir Hospital between April and May, according to Dr. Mohamed Jama, head of the nutrition center.

He said such increases in patients usually occur during major crises like drought or famine but called the current situation unprecedented.

“The funding gap has impacted not only the malnourished but also health staff, whose salaries have been cut,’’ he said.

Fadumo Ali Adawe, a mother of five who lives in one of the camps, said she urgently needed help for her 3-year-old daughter, malnourished now for nine months. The nearby nutrition center she frequented is now closed.

‘‘We are unsure of what to do next," she said.

Inside that center, empty food packages were strewn about — and USAID posters still hung on the walls.

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