Aid cuts could be paid for with children's lives in Rohingya camps: UN March 12, 2025
- Ana Cunha-Busch
- Mar 11
- 3 min read
By AFP - Agence France Presse
Aid cuts could be paid for with children's lives in Rohingya camps: UN
The United Nations warned on Tuesday that the global aid funding crisis could be paid for with the lives of children in the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh unless sustainable funds emerge quickly.
US President Donald Trump imposed a freeze on foreign aid in January pending a review, causing a shock in the humanitarian community.
Large numbers of people from the persecuted and stateless Rohingya community live in squalid refugee camps in Bangladesh, most having arrived after fleeing a 2017 military crackdown in neighboring Myanmar.
Successive aid cuts have already caused severe hardship among the Rohingya in the overcrowded settlements, who depend on aid and suffer from rampant malnutrition.
The UN International Children's Emergency Fund said that young people in the camps were facing the worst levels of malnutrition since 2017, with admissions for treatment of severe malnutrition increasing by 27% in February compared to the same months in 2024.
Following the foreign aid review, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Monday that Washington was canceling 83% of US Agency for International Development programs.
“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. More than 15% of them are malnourished - an emergency threshold,” she said.
“Any further reduction in humanitarian support could drive families to extreme desperation.”
“There is no substitute for the scale of support provided by donor governments and no substitute for the valuable partnership with the United States,” she said.
“UNICEF is determined to stay and work for the children - but we need help. Without the guarantees of sustained funding, our life-saving humanitarian services are at risk. And the price will be paid with children's lives.”
Flowers said that UNICEF had received a humanitarian waiver from the US for its program to treat children with severe acute malnutrition, but needed funding to make it work, and the money is about to run out in June.
The canceled US grants to Bangladesh “are equivalent to about a quarter of our Rohingya refugee response costs in 2024,” she said.
Trump's chief cost-cutter, tech billionaire Elon Musk, insisted last week on X, which he owns, that “nobody died as a result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding. Nobody.”
Cuts in rights grants
Other UN agencies have detailed how the change in US funding has affected their operations.
The US was the top voluntary contributor to the UN Human Rights Office in 2024, contributing $36 million, about 13.5% of that revenue, which represented 61% of the office's funding in 2023.
The agency said it had received letters of termination of its US State Department grants for ongoing projects in Equatorial Guinea, Iraq, and Ukraine, and for two USAID grants - in Colombia and the Voluntary Fund for Indigenous Peoples.
“There was an immediate impact. In Iraq, we are ending a US-funded program that involved working with victims of torture and families of missing persons,” said spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani.
“We are trying to reduce costs wherever possible. In some countries, we will have to reduce some of our work.”
rjm/gv
Comments