Foreign Aid — News & Analysis

Child malnutrition in Nepal has reached 'alarming' levels since aid cuts, survey finds (June 26, 2026)

The Guardian reports that the largest survey of under-fives ever conducted in Nepal has found child malnutrition at alarming levels, just over a year after USAID — the flagship U.S. aid agency shut down by the Trump administration in 2025 — ended its funding for child nutrition work in the country. More than one million children between six months and five years old were weighed and measured during a three-week government screening program in May. Nationally, 7.8 percent of children were found to be wasted — underweight for their height — with 1.6 percent severely wasted and 17.4 percent underweight for their age. In Madhesh province near the Indian border, the wasting rate reached 12.3 percent and the underweight rate 24.2 percent. The World Health Organization classifies wasting rates at or above 10 percent as high and calls for immediate intervention. Pooja Pandey Rana, country director for Helen Keller Intl in Nepal, noted that the screening reached only about half the children in the relevant age groups and that rates in remote areas may run higher still. A malnourished child, she said, faces a risk of death twelve times that of a well-nourished one.

The concern is reversal of a long trend. Nepal had been a leader in reducing deaths among children under five, cutting that rate by 72 percent between 1996 and 2022; Pandey Rana said the worry now is backsliding. Helen Keller Intl had been scheduled to receive $72 million from USAID over five years beginning in 2025, funding nutrition programs reaching nearly 9 million people across 48 districts. It has replaced only a fraction — just under $5 million from other donors, serving 223,000 people in nine districts. The structural damage is less about supplies than about the system that connected supplies to children. Nepal's government purchases the country's stocks of Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food, the nutrient-dense paste used to treat acute malnutrition, but the community outreach around it — health workers going door to door to find children needing treatment, then referring and following up — was aid-funded and stopped abruptly with the cuts. Over the past fourteen months, Pandey Rana described a breakdown in which the therapeutic food exists and the services exist, but families do not arrive and no one remains to refer or follow up.

Other pressures compound the loss. Pandey Rana emphasized that reducing malnutrition requires an integrated approach spanning gender equality — given the links between women's empowerment and children's health — and access to clean, safe water. Food prices have risen sharply: she offered the example of eggs, promoted as a wholesome food, where two now cost as much as a kilogram of rice, an impossible choice for a food-insecure household. Domestically, malnutrition competes for government funding against other health priorities such as immunization. Methodological differences make direct comparison with earlier surveys difficult, though a 2025 survey put national wasting among under-fives at 6.6 percent, and Pandey Rana said the current figures are certainly higher than they would have been fourteen months ago. Beyond immediate mortality risk from a compromised immune system, she pointed to research linking early malnutrition to worse school performance and lower productivity in later life. A UNICEF spokesperson in Nepal said supplies remain insufficient to meet demand for treatment, and that only about 35 percent of children under five affected by wasting are currently receiving it.