Kathmandu, Nepal – Breastfeeding support services throughout Nepal have been suspended due to a work prescription issued by the United States for foreign aid and development programs.
The services, funded by the American agency for international development and administered by the Nepalese government, were essential to guarantee the life and health of infants in the country, where nearly 50,000 babies under 1 die each year.
“The program had to reduce the infant mortality rate and the number of malnutrition children in Nepal, but (IT) has now been suspended,” explains Lila Bikram Thapa, nutrition head of the nutrition section of the department of health services of Nepal.
Breastfeeding services were part of the integrated nutrition program, a five -year initiative that started in January. Most of the program’s budget – US $ 72 million – was to be used in the health sector, but it also included funding for food production and safety, all of them aimed at reducing malnutrition. A third of the funding – $ 25 million – has already been filed with the Treasury of the State of Nepal. Nevertheless, all the work stopped immediately, on the basis of a directive described in a January 20 Issued by the administration of American president Donald Trump.
USAID was apparently closed on Monday, when all workers in the US government department have been informed that they should not come to work and their messaging accounts have been closed.
The integrated nutrition program is not the only project for which the suspension could seriously and negatively affect infants in Nepal. A similar project, which started in August last year, appointed nurses in breastfeeding in 18 hospitals across the country. The government provided for a similar campaign at the local level to combat malnutrition in babies. All of these programs stopped after the financing break.
“This will directly affect mothers and children during the thousand days of gold,” said Kumari Bhattarai, head of community nursing care of the Nepal Health Services department, referring to the first three years of a child’s life.
The judgment order, called by the US government, a 90 -day “financing break”, will have long -term negative effects, says Thapa.
“We expect (to) achieve the objectives to eliminate the morbidity and mortality associated with malnutrition, which can create direct human loss,” explains Thapa.
Instead, the prevalence of infantile malnutrition will probably increase, Health workers told Global Press Journal.
Support and awareness of breastfeeding are particularly important in Nepal, where the percentage of babies exclusively breastfed under 6 months increased from 66% in 2016 to just under 56% in 2022, according to a survey on the demographic health of Nepal. More than a third of all children are too short for their age due to malnutrition.
Breastfeeding is a powerful tool which, according to the study after study, prevents malnutrition and many of its life effects, which include poor cognition and even weak wages as an adult. And it is a proven rescue buoy: in low and intermediate income countries, infants who are not breastfed are six to 10 times more likely to die in the first months of life.
The Trump administration’s executive decree of January 20 said that “the United States’s foreign aid industry and bureaucracy is not aligned with American interests and in many antithetical cases on American values”. The Stop-Work order has ordered USAID to suspend any funding for its implementation partners, as well as to put an end to the implementation of the programs funded by the USAID. US foreign aid amounts to around $ 70 billion – Only 1% of the country’s federal budget.
Around the world, programs that have provided HIV / AIDS drugs, food for hungry people, network mosquitoes to help prevent malaria, treatment of tuberculosis and more ended without warning.
Although the order of arrest work is temporary, it is not clear which programs, if necessary, will see the long -term restored funding.
The USAID official website is broken down, and USAID and the White House press office did not respond to requests for information from Global Press Journal.