“Tens of thousands of children dying quietly at home”: the human toll of USAID cuts
“Tens of thousands of children dying quietly at home”: the human toll of USAID cuts
Mark Moore is racing to make up for lost time. He’s CEO of Mana Nutrition, a nonprofit that makes a nutritional paste from peanuts for starving children.
Most of Moore’s packets of nutritional paste are sent to Africa. Earlier this year, Moore got a series of emails from his main client, USAID.
“It’s been a kind of a yo-yo effect,” Moore said. “First, there was an email in January.”
That email said Moore’s contracts were paused and that he should stop work. About a week later, he was told to resume operations. But then a few weeks after that? Never mind, Moore’s contracts were abruptly canceled. USAID said Mana’s life-sustaining packets weren’t “in the national interest.” Then, the yo-yo bounced up a final time when Moore was told to restart a week later.
He did, even though the federal government still owes him a lot of money. “Somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million to $25 million,” he said.
All this time, Moore was thinking about the children in places like Sudan and Chad who depend on Mana’s nutritional paste.
If these malnourished kids go for a week without food, “for a child under six — especially these children — it’ll cost them their life.”
The gutting of USAID has derailed aid programs around the world. The State Department said it’s terminating around 80% of USAID’s grants and contracts. Aid groups and nonprofits say even some of the life-saving humanitarian programs the Department promised to protect are faltering. And children — like the ones Moore helps to feed — could especially suffer.
Moore said it’s all well and good for him to be producing his packets again, but they still have to get to these children. And there could be big supply disruptions this summer because of other contract cancellations and payment disruptions for shippers. And if nonprofits that run feeding centers in places like Africa are not able to restart their work, the outlook is grim.
Put plainly: Children will die, Moore said.
“We may not even be able to count them. They will have nowhere to go. So it would probably look like tens of thousands of children dying quietly at home,” he said.
In an email, the State Department told me “critical USAID program awards remain active.”
But for the most part, USAID still isn’t able to make payments or issue new contracts, according to Charles Kenny, senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. That’s not just for food aid. Kenny said the U.S. also paid for anti-viral drugs for HIV and AIDS patients across the globe.
“Without all of that being fixed, we have an emergency of just an awesome scale. We are talking 3 million, maybe 4 million deaths over the course of a year,” he said.
Kenny added that the first victims of any AIDS crisis will be children born to HIV positive mothers who weren’t taking anti-viral drugs. If those babies don’t get anti-virals right away, around half of them could die within a year.
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