Foreign aid cuts: what’s happening and what does it mean for children?

What is foreign aid?

Foreign aid is goods, services, money or technical assistance provided from one country to another.  

It allows us to deliver lifesaving programmes around the world, with our partners, so that children can grow up healthy, educated, and live free from violence.    

Beyond meeting children’s most urgent needs, foreign assistance opens pathways for peace, thriving communities, global security and economic stability. It mitigates the risk of future humanitarian crises that could require more intervention. 

What difference can foreign aid make? Does it matter?  

Foreign aid saves children’s lives. In the last 35 years alone, with the support of foreign aid, we have worked together to help:  

• Halve the number of children dying before the age of 5. That’s 122 million lives saved since 1990!
• Ensure that today, there are 49 million fewer stunted children than there were in 2000. That means the number of children stunted by malnutrition due to lacking the vital nutrition needed to develop, has reduced by a third in the last 25 years.
• Reduce child marriage by a third since 1990.  Since 2010, we’ve helped stop 68 million child marriages, meaning girls can stay in school, are less exposed to violence and can fulfil their goals and dreams.
• Help nearly 9 in 10 primary school aged children get a quality education

Beyond meeting children’s most urgent needs in a crisis, foreign aid provides medical assistance, keeps children in school, and protects them from abuse and harm.

Foreign aid is a beacon of hope. When aid is cut, it sends shockwaves around the world, disrupting economies, eroding children’s rights.

Furthermore, foreign aid benefits all of us! It does this by:

• Helping our economies: Investment in health, education, and infrastructure reduces the risk of future humanitarian crises. Cutting aid will lead to greater financial challenges in the future around the world
• Keeping us healthy: Viruses don’t recognise borders. Foreign aid helps stop diseases from spreading, including HIV/AIDS, Ebola, polio, tuberculosis and more.
• Making the world safer: Cutting aid can fuel conflict and increase poverty, leading to an increase of displaced people and instability, threatening world peace. 

What’s happening with foreign aid now?

Foreign aid cuts are putting our lifesaving work under threat. Governments across the world are slashing foreign aid budgets that millions of children facing the toughest challenges depend on.

What does this mean for children?

Hundreds of thousands of children facing war, starvation, poverty and disease are being denied food and medical support as essential supplies have been held up at borders and in warehouses for weeks.  

Sick and injured children will arrive at shuttered health clinics with nowhere else to go; children will be lucky to get one meal a day; children will be forced into work or marriage when their schools shut down; children who have experienced trauma will have to try coping alone. Life for millions will come to a grinding halt.  

Gabriella Waaijman, Save the Children International’s chief operating officer, says: 

We are talking about stopping aid to severely malnourished children in the middle of treatment. Closing clinics supporting pregnant women and newborn babies. It’s absolutely excruciating. I am in tears every single day.

We have been forced to immediately stop our lifesaving work – while children are facing extreme hunger in Sudan. While war and heavy fighting continue to rage in the Democratic Republic of Congo. While families in Lebanon and Syria are fighting to survive and rebuild. And when climate change is threatening millions of children’s lives and futures around the globe.

What can I do?

For more than 100 years Save the Children has provided healthcare, nutrition, education and protection to children in need.

By donating to our Children’s Emergency Fund, you can give children a chance to grow up, helping them wherever and whenever they need it. 

Our Children’s Emergency Fund allows us to keep lifesaving feeding centres open in Sudan. It helps us ensure emergency health services for children and their mothers in DRC. And it helps families rebuild in Lebanon and Syria.  It helps us support children living through some of the world’s toughest crises, wherever and whenever they need it.  

Together, we can save children’s futures. While challenges are huge, our determination to protect children is bigger.