America’s Retreat From Aid Is Devastating Somalia’s Health System

The mothers arrived at the emergency feeding center all day long, their faces tight with anxiety, their children limp in their arms. Nurses quickly weighed each child and checked for infection. The frailest were given tubes threaded up their noses and down into their bellies, for a slow drip of fortified milk. Those a little bigger were placed in a bed in a packed room for feeding with therapeutic peanut paste. The ones with rashes, fevers and deep, hacking coughs — potential diphtheria, measles, whooping cough, maybe cholera — were tucked into bare isolation rooms.

It wasn’t like this even six months ago.

Here in Baidoa, a city in southern Somalia, community health workers used to go door to door looking for children who were too thin or sick. Care was swift, and free, at rudimentary clinics set up in camps and neighborhoods. Families received parcels of special foods packed with nutrients. As a result, it was rare for children to deteriorate to the point they needed to be transported to a center for 24-hour care.

But the community health clinics, and emergency food, were paid for by the United States, through its Agency for International Development. When the Trump administration dismantled the agency and ended vast swaths of foreign assistance to the world’s poorest countries, much of the food aid and health care for children across Somalia were abruptly cut off.

So now more children are arriving at emergency centers, and they are sicker and thinner than ever. Their vertebrae poke like the teeth of a comb through the translucent skin of their backs.