How US Aid Cuts Endanger Pregnant Refugees in Kenya

U.S. foreign aid cuts are having visible consequences in a maternity ward inside one of the world’s largest refugee camps. Reporting from Kakuma, a sprawling camp in northwest Kenya that is home to nearly 310,000 people, ProPublica details how the Trump administration’s decision to halt funding to the World Food Program (WFP) led to sharp reductions in food rations. The cuts came despite earlier assurances from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that lifesaving assistance would continue during a review of U.S. foreign aid. Instead, aid programs were reduced or shut down, and officials say rising hunger is now contributing to dangerous pregnancy complications.

At Kakuma’s only hospital, operated by the International Rescue Committee, the lone physician on duty in August, Dr. Kefa Otieno, said he was seeing a surge in malnourished pregnant women and premature, underweight newborns. Blood supplies are so limited that Otieno has donated his own blood while performing surgeries. In a sparse room known as the “kangaroo” ward—without working incubators and relying solely on skin-to-skin contact—two mothers, Monica and Binti, spent weeks trying to keep their premature babies warm while hoping they would gain enough weight to be discharged. Both women suffered from anemia and food shortages during pregnancy; one resorted to eating clay and charcoal, while the other went two days without food and pleaded with a vendor for a samosa she could not afford.

Inside the hospital, patients receive three modest meals a day. Outside its walls, food rations have been cut so severely that in August the WFP limited distributions to roughly half of the camp’s population. Families were assigned to categories that left some residents—including Monica’s husband and Binti—with no rations at all. Monica and her younger siblings received an allocation of about 420 calories per person per day.

The strain is not limited to Kakuma. Over the summer, Al Jazeera reported similar pressures at Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camp, where steep funding cuts forced the WFP to make what officials described as “very difficult decisions about who gets to eat and who doesn’t.” In late September, the U.S. released $66 million for WFP operations in Kenya, about 40 percent less than the previous year, according to ProPublica. The WFP says those funds will sustain food distributions only through March, and at levels below what aid groups consider the minimum needed.

A senior State Department official said the United States continues to provide “hundreds of millions” of dollars to the WFP and is shifting toward investments it believes will better serve U.S. interests and allies such as Kenya. The White House budget office has rejected responsibility for delays in funding. The Japan Times has also reported on how aid cuts and resulting malnutrition in Kenya are affecting children more broadly.

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