Inside a Kenyan Maternity Ward Being Starved by US Foreign Aid Cuts |
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In August, I traveled to Kakuma, Kenya, to try to understand what happened when the U.S. cut off food to the world’s third-largest refugee camp.
Soon after President Donald Trump froze foreign aid on his first day in office, my colleague Brett Murphy and I began hearing from government experts. We learned that despite explicit promises from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that food and other life-saving care would continue during the administration’s review of foreign aid, programs were shutting down, putting millions of lives at risk. I’ve covered health in the U.S. and abroad for 15 years, and Brett has covered both the State Department and public health in the U.S. Brett and I teamed up, interviewing dozens of government officials and aid workers, and pouring over reams of internal government documents. Then, we traveled to Kakuma (and South Sudan) to see for ourselves how these policies were affecting people.
In an investigation we published last week, we wrote about how food rations were slashed throughout the camp of more than 308,000 people. We learned first-hand how the Trump administration’s decision to withhold funding for the World Food Program’s operations in Kenya led children to starve and forced thousands of families to make impossible decisions. One of the groups hit hardest by the cuts was pregnant women.
We arrived on a hot, dry day in August with Kenyan photographer Brian Otieno and went straight to the camp’s only hospital, which is run by the International Rescue Committee. The only physician working the hospital’s wards at the time, Dr. Kefa Otieno (no relation to the photographer), gave us a tour.
As we entered the maternity unit, a large yellow room with around 45 beds, the majority of them occupied, the doctor explained that the aid cuts were causing an........