UN’s crucial humanitarian aid work faces a clouded future amid cuts in funds

At a refugee camp in northern Kenya, Aujene Cimanimpaye waits as a hot lunch of lentils and sorghum is ladled out for her and her nine children — all born while she has received United Nations assistance since fleeing her violence-wracked home in Congo in 2007.

“We cannot go back home because people are still being killed,” the 41-year-old said at the Kakuma camp, where the U.N. World Food Program and U.N. refugee agency help support more than 300,000 refugees.

Her family moved from Nakivale Refugee Settlement in neighboring Uganda three years ago to Kenya, now home to more than a million refugees from conflict-hit east African countries.

A few kilometers (miles) away at the Kalobeyei Refugee Settlement, fellow Congolese refugee Bahati Musaba, a mother of five, said that since 2016, “U.N. agencies have supported my children’s education — we get food and water and even medicine,” as well as cash support from WFP to buy food and other basics.

This year, those cash transfers — and many other U.N. aid activities — have stopped, threatening to upend or jeopardize millions of lives.

As the U.N. marks its 80th anniversary this month, its humanitarian agencies are facing one of the greatest crises in their history: The biggest funder — the United States — under the Trump administration and other Western donors have slashed international aid spending. Some want to use the money to build up national defense.

Some U.N. agencies are increasingly pointing fingers at one another as they battle over a shrinking pool of funding, said a diplomat from a top donor country who spoke on condition of anonymity to comment freely about the funding crisis faced by some U.N. agencies.

Such pressures, humanitarian groups say, diminish the pivotal role of the U.N. and its partners in efforts to save millions of lives — by providing tents, food and water to people fleeing unrest in places like Myanmar, Sudan, Syria and Venezuela, or helping stamp out smallpox decades ago.

“It’s the most abrupt upheaval of humanitarian work in the U.N. in my 40 years as a humanitarian worker, by far,” said Jan Egeland, a former U.N. humanitarian aid chief who now heads the Norwegian Refugee Council. “And it will make the gap between exploding needs and contributions to aid work even bigger.”