Kakuma refugee camp in Turkana, Kenya in 2024.
Source: Xinhua News Agency/Getty Images
Trump’s Aid Cuts are Hitting the World’s Largest Refugee Camps
US and Western aid cuts have left hundreds of thousands of refugees in Kenya’s Kakuma camp facing hunger, disease, and rising violence — a stark sign of how Trump’s policies are rippling through the world’s most vulnerable communities.
Every two months, Claudia Ncutinamagara, a 39-year-old Burundian living in one of the world’s largest refugee camps, receives four kilograms of cereals, a kilogram of lentils and just over a liter of vegetable oil to feed her family of four. The rations are so meager that she struggles to breastfeed her youngest, an infant boy.
Ncutinamagara is among the 240,000 refugees at the UN’s Kakuma camp in remote northern Kenya who’ve seen the aid they rely on to survive slashed this year — leaving tens of thousands of children out of school, plunging as many or more into malnutrition and depriving hospitals of life-saving medicine. Ten months after US President Donald Trump began dismantling the US foreign aid system — and other Western countries including the UK, Germany and the Netherlands slashed their giving – more than 100 million refugees and forcibly displaced people around the world are starting to feel the effects.