Written by Lisa Murimi
Under a punishing sun and on dust-choked ground, mothers clutch limp children as they wait for the little food still left to give.
In Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp, home to nearly 300,000 people, hunger has taken hold with brutal force.
Emaciated children lie silently at Amusait Hospital. Nine-month-old James, the eighth child of Ugandan refugee Agnes Awila, stares with hollow eyes.
Nearby, baby Hellen’s skin peels in angry red patches; a medic whispers it’s from severe malnutrition.
“The food is not enough, my children eat only once a day. If there’s no food, what do you feed them?” she asks.
This slow-motion tragedy follows deep U.S. funding cuts to the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP), previously supported 70% by Washington. The result: food rations have been slashed to just 30% of the minimum needed to survive.
“If we have a protracted situation where this is what we can manage, then basically we have a slowly starving population,” says Felix Okech, the WFP’s head of refugee operations in Kenya.
The suffering ripples across the camp. Mukuniwa Bililo Mami, diabetic and a refugee for 13 years, once relied on small cash transfers to buy vegetables for her diet locally known as “bamba chakula”.
Now, she survives on lentils and rice, food she admits worsens her condition.
She also used the money to start a vegetable garden and rear chicken and ducks, which she sold to other refugees, at a market.
At a local shop, Badaba Ibrahim watches helplessly as hungry neighbors beg for food.
“They will tell you, ‘My children have not eaten for a full day,'” Mr Ibrahim says.
Without urgent action and restored funding, Kakuma’s residents face a looming disaster.
And the prospect of more funding is not very promising and unless things change over the next two months, the refugees are staring at starvation come August.
“It is a really dire situation,” admits Mr Okeck.
“We do have some signals from some one or two donors about support with that cash component. But remember, the very kind and generous US has been providing over 70% – so if you’re still missing 70%… those prospects are not good.”
