United Nations agency forces 650,000 women, Ethiopia to prevent food assistance for children

Adis Ababa: World Food Program On Tuesday said that it was suspending assistance for 650,000 Malnuting women and children In Ethiopia Due to lack of funds.
The United Nations agency warned that they were among 3.6 million people in Ethiopia, who would not have access to food aid without immediate new funding in the coming weeks.
,WFP A statement stated that 650,000 malnourished women and children are being forced to prevent treatment in May due to insufficient funds.
“WFP planned to reach two million mothers and children with life -saving nutrition aid in 2025,” he said.
Like other aid agencies, WFP is caught in crosshare of funding cuts by US President Donald Trump, who signed an executive order freezing all foreign aid for three months immediately after the inauguration in January.
This comes because many western countries have also reduced assistance expenses.
The United Nations agency said that about 130 million people in the East African country are facing hunger.
Ethiopia is still recovering from a cruel civil war between federal forces and rebels in the northern region of Tigre between 2020 and November 2022, killing at least 600,000 people.
Nearly one million people, a sixth of Tigre’s population, are still displaced.
There are also armed conflicts in Ethiopia’s two most populous areas, Amhara and Oromia, who have displaced hundreds of thousands of people.
The WFP warned that the violence was interrupting human operations, restricting its ability to “reach more than half a million weaker people in the region”.
Ethiopia has also been watching a boom of refugees from neighboring Sudan, has been hit by civil war since April 2023, and South Sudan, married for a long time with instability.
The WFP stated that cash and food assistance for a million refugees would also be closed in June “If additional money is not received and the number of people escaping from violence in South Sudan continues”.
Ethiopia, a landlock country in Horn, Africa, is also facing intense drought, especially in its Somali region on the border with Somalia.
lack of funds
Amid growing needs, WFP stated that it was facing a decrease of $ 222 million for the April-September period in Ethiopia.
“I think this is an important time to remind the world and our donors and others,” Zlaton Millissic, director of a country of WFP, told AFP that the human condition in Ethiopia is not very good, and it’s really going to deteriorate. “
Last week, the Paris-based organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said that development aid was already falling worldwide before the USAID cut.
It said that the assistance fell 7.1 percent between 2023 and 2024, the first decline in six years, as many countries reduced their budget.