US's aid cuts to kill more than 14 mn globally; 4.5 mn children! Study

World: US’s Donald Trump administration withdrawing US foreign aid could end in killing 14 million people, who are the most vulnerable in the world, and a third of them are children, Agence France-Presse reported, citing a research study published on Tuesday.

According to AFP, the result was published when world leaders gathered for a UN conference in Spain to back the aid sector.

Before Trump 2.0, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) had provided 40 per cent of global humanitarian funding.

One of the authors of the published study and researcher at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), David Rasella, said that the sudden cuts in funding will halt or even reverse two decades of progress in health among vulnerable populations. In a statement, Rasella said that for many low- and middle-income countries, the resulting shock would be comparable in scale to a global pandemic or a major armed conflict.

According to the study, which examined data from 133 nations, USAID funding prevented an estimated 91 million deaths in developing countries between 2001 and 2021. With modelling, the researchers also projected how an 83 per cent fund cut could affect death rates. The figure of 83 per cent for fund cuts was announced by the US administration earlier this year. As per the researcher's projection, the said cuts could lead to more than 14 million avoidable deaths by 2030. Among them, 4.5 million would be children under the age of five, that is 7,00,000 child deaths every year.

After the US announced the fund cuts, several major donors such as Germany, the U.K. and France also announced the same, resulting in a major drop in the funding globally. The researchers say that this could lead to more deaths than projected in the coming years.