Millions of children already affected: UN

The UN children's agency Unicef said yesterday that it was studying the impact of drastic US aid cuts, with millions of children already affected by the funding freeze imposed last month.

US President Donald Trump, on his first day back in office last month, demanded a 90-day freeze on all US foreign aid to give his administration time to review overseas spending, with an eye to gutting programmes not aligned with his "America First" agenda.

The State Department announced Wednesday that multi-year aid contracts were being slashed by 92 percent, in a bid to make around $60 billion in savings in development and overseas humanitarian programmes.

"We have received termination notices for Unicef grants, and they include humanitarian as well as development programming," the agency's spokesman James Elder said at a press conference in Geneva.

"We continue to assess the impact of those termination notices on our programmes for children. But we already know that the initial pause has impacted programming for millions of children in roughly half the countries that we work.

"Without urgent action, without funding, more children are going to suffer malnutrition. Fewer will have access to education, and preventable illnesses will claim more lives," he said.

"So it's very clear that reduction in any funding during these exceedingly difficult times for children is putting child lives at risk at a time when they need support more than ever."

The US has, until now, been by far the world's largest donor of humanitarian and development aid.

Geetanjali Narayan, Unicef's representative in Haiti, told the briefing that US aid was crucial to children's lives in the poorest country in the Caribbean.