UK aid cuts are set to leave millions at risk across Africa

Support to developing countries is to be slashed by nearly 90 per cent, Save the Children reports, as malnutrition hits hard

- NICK FERRIS

Around a year and a half after the birth of her daughter Ereng, Lomanat, 39, became extremely worried about the toddler's health. She seemed an unhealthy weight, often crying as a result of hunger, but the family – which includes dad Daniel, 40, and son Mzee, 8 – were unable to give her the food that she needed.

Life had become hard after recent droughts in the area of northern Kenya where they live killed off all of the 40 goats they kept for food and to sell. The family no longer had a sustainable income or reliable food source, and now make most of their money by burning wood to make charcoal to sell. “My child was in very bad shape,” Lomanat says of Ereng. “She was malnourished.”

Lomanat was able to walk two miles in the heat to a clinic, which supplied her with nutritional treatment for Ereng, in the form of a chocolate-flavoured fortified peanut paste. “My child started gaining weight and gaining weight, until I saw that the baby became alive again,” says Lomanat. “I am very happy, because she is cured.”

The support that Ereng received was funded by Save the Children, but the charity is now warning that aid cuts are putting their nutrition programmes at risk.

Specifically, in a new analysis shared exclusively with The