Child malnutrition in Nepal has reached ‘alarming’ levels since aid cuts, survey finds

A child is weighed in Bajura district in Nepal in 2022. Death rates among the under-fives declined in the country by 72% between 1996 and 2022. Photograph: Rebecca Conway/Getty Images View image in fullscreen A child is weighed in Bajura district in Nepal in 2022. Death rates among the under-fives declined in the country by 72% between 1996 and 2022. Photograph: Rebecca Conway/Getty Images Child malnutrition in Nepal has reached ‘alarming’ levels since aid cuts, survey finds Fears hard-won gains in reducing child mortality over 20 years are at risk after end of USAID funding for nutrition programmes Child malnutrition in Nepal has reached “alarming” levels, according to the largest ever survey of under-fives in the country. The new figures came just over a year after USAID , the former US flagship agency closed by the Trump administration in 2025, stopped funding work on child nutrition in Nepal. A senior Nepalese nutrition expert, who ran programmes in the country that were axed in the US aid cuts, said she worried that hard-won gains in reducing child mortality over the past 20 years were at risk. “If you are malnourished, your risk of dying, compared to a child who is not malnourished, is 12 times higher,” said Pooja Pandey Rana. “What we’re seeing is [an] alarming rate of acute malnutrition in Nepal .” More than one million children aged between six months and five years were weighed and measured as part of a government screening programme carried out over three weeks in May. The World Health Organization deems rates of wasting – the percentage of children who are underweight for their height – of 10% or above to be “high”, and suggests they should prompt immediate intervention. The survey revealed rates as high as 12.3% in one province, Madhesh, near the Indian border. There, 24.2% of children were classed as underweight, meaning their weight was low for their age. Overall, 7.8% of children suffered from wasting and 1.6% from severe wasting, while 17.4% were underweight. Pandey Rana, Helen Keller Intl’s country director for Nepal, said the screening had only reached about half of the country’s children in the relevant age groups, and rates in remote areas could be higher still. Nepal had been a leading country in reducing death rates among under-fives, which declined by 72% between 1996 and 2022 . Pandey Rana said: “The worry we have is we are now backsliding.” Beyond the immediate risk to a child’s life from malnutrition that compromises the immune system, she pointed to research that also linked it to worse school performance and productivity as they got older. Helen Keller Intl was due to receive $72m from USAID over five years, beginning in 2025, to deliver nutrition programmes covering almost 9 million people in 48 districts. It has only been able to partly replace that funding, raising just under $5m from other donors to reach 223,000 people in nine districts. Nepal’s government buys the country’s stocks of Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Foo