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

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. …