UN agency halts life-saving treatments in African state
The World Food Program (WFP) has suspended treatment for 650,000 women and children suffering from malnutrition in Ethiopia, saying it is at a “breaking point” due to a shortage of funding.
The UN agency’s Country Director in Ethiopia, Zlatan Milisic, announced the decision on Tuesday and warned that food assistance for 3.6 million people in the East African country will also run out by June without urgent financial support.
“We’ve been left no choice but to this week suspend treatment for 650,000 malnourished women and children simply because we’ve run out of commodities and funding,” Milisic told a Geneva press briefing.
“Millions of Ethiopians are one shock away from falling into a catastrophe. We need a swift and generous donor response to ensure the country’s most vulnerable people get the assistance they need,” he said.
In a statement, the WFP said it had planned to reach two million Ethiopian mothers and children with life-saving nutrition assistance in 2025, but it faces a funding shortfall of $222 million for the April-September period “despite the generosity of many governments and individual donors.”
The humanitarian agency receives financing from around 15-20 donors, including the US, but several of them have cut funding this year, Reuters reported, citing Milisic. He said that while the organization has been exempted from US President Donald Trump’s aid freeze that has disrupted humanitarian operations globally, few donations have been received do far in 2025.
Ethiopia has been under severe economic pressure as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and a brutal two-year civil war in the northern Tigray region, which ended in 2022. Renewed clashes in the country’s two most populous regions, Amhara and Oromia, in recent weeks have also reportedly forced hundreds of thousands out of their homes.
Prolonged droughts in southeastern Ethiopia and the influx of refugees from neighboring war-torn Sudan are also contributing to the country’s rising humanitarian crisis, the UN food agency has said.
Along with the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the WFP halted food shipments to Tigray in May 2023, claiming that supplies were being diverted.
