Trump’s aid cuts hitting world’s largest refugee camps

EVERY two months, Claudia Ncutinamagara, a 39-year-old Burundian living in one of the world’s largest refugee camps, receives four kilograms of cereals, a kilogram of lentils and just over a liter of vegetable oil to feed her family of four.

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The rations are so meagre that she struggles to breastfeed her youngest, an infant boy.

Neutinamagara is among the 240 000 refugees at the UN’s Kakuma camp in remote northern Kenya who've seen the aid they rely on to survive slashed this year — leaving tens of thousands of children out of school, plunging as many or more into malnutrition and depriving hospitals of lifesaving medicine. Ten months after US President Donald Trump began dismantling the US foreign aid system — and other Western countries including the UK, Germany and the Netherlands slashed their giving - more than 100 million refugees and forcibly displaced people around the world are starting to feel the effects.

The Trump administration’s decision to shutter the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which had led the global fight against infectious disease, has already resulted in more than 600 000 deaths, most of them children, according to modelling done by epidemiologist Brooke Nichols at Boston University. It’s likely to get worse — US foreign assistance commitments fell by more than half in the fiscal year ending September compared to the same period in 2024, to $14.7 billion (R251.4 billion) from R540.4 billion - according to a Bloomberg analysis of spending on global health, food aid, international disaster assistance, refugees and development.

“We feel like we've been abandoned,” said Ncutinamagara, who arrived in Kenya in 2017 after fleeing violence in her home country. “We exist but that’s it — it’s hopeless.”