UN says millions of children already affected by US aid halt

The U.N. children's agency UNICEF said Friday that it was studying the impact of drastic U.S. aid cuts, with millions of children already affected by the funding freeze imposed last month.

U.S. President Donald Trump, on his first day back in office last month, demanded a 90-day freeze on all US foreign aid to give his administration time to review overseas spending, with an eye to gutting programs not aligned with his "America First" agenda.

The State Department announced Wednesday that multi-year aid contracts were being slashed by 92 percent, in a bid to make around $60 billion in savings in development and overseas humanitarian programs.

"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 programs for children. But we already know that the initial pause has impacted programming for millions of children in roughly half the countries that 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."

The United States has, until now, been by far the world's largest donor of humanitarian and development aid.

Impact in Haiti

Geetanjali Narayan, UNICEF's representative in Haiti, told the briefing that U.S. aid was crucial to children's lives in the poorest country in the Caribbean.

"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."

Narayan visited a primary health care center in northern Haiti in late January where nurses were weighing babies and screening for malnutrition, with the support of U.S. aid via UNICEF.

"These activities will no longer be able to continue," she said.

The agency's partners and civil society organizations in the country have also been heavily affected, Narayan said.

Meanwhile the U.N.'s World Food Program had more positive news, saying that two weeks ago, the freeze on in-kind food assistance to WFP, purchased from US farmers, was rescinded.

"We've been able to resume our regular operations under all the existing USAID grants that we have," WFP Sudan spokeswoman Leni Kinzli told the briefing via video from Nairobi.