One Year After the Aid Cuts, Refugees Are Still Paying the Price

A year on from the cascade of foreign aid cuts from governments around the world, a visit to Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya shows instantly how decisions made far away have deep human costs.

I recently spent two weeks in Kakuma, home to more than 300,000 refugees fleeing conflicts across the region, where three topics dominate every conversation: thirst, hunger, and the “cuts”. Policy choices are measured in empty plates, dry jerry cans, and the quiet recalibration of what survival means.

The new “differentiated assistance” system that came because of the reduced budget divides refugees into four vulnerability categories. Only three receive any food assistance at all. Those in Category 3 receive just 20 per cent of the recommended monthly ration; Category 1, those with the highest need, just 60%. Category 4 receives nothing.

This became a mechanism for exclusion.

IsraAID runs safe spaces for teenage mothers, some just 14 or 15 years old. When you speak to them, hunger is the dominant theme. Many of these girls are somehow classified as Category 4. They receive no food assistance whatsoever. Their days are organized around scarcity; how to feed themselves and their children is the key daily task. They learn beading and sewing, which helps them generate a small income. It’s never enough, but it helps them stave off the worst. It is a fragile substitute for a food system that once at least attempted to meet basic needs.

Across the camp, the safety net is unravelling. Health outreach services are running out of most of the supplies they need to meet basic nutrition needs, leaving only specialized products for severe acute malnutrition. So, essentially, we wait until children are visibly wasting before help arrives. Moderate malnutrition, where intervention could still prevent lifelong harm, often goes untreated.

The consequences are predictable. The World Food Program has repeatedly warned that prolonged ration cuts increase child stunting, maternal mortality, and long-term cognitive damage. In Kakuma, those warnings are no longer projections.

Water scarcity in Kakuma has always been real, but today, it’s on another level. There is simply not enough water available in either the camp or the surrounding communities, forcing people to the dried-out riverbed in search of groundwater. Each morning and afternoon it fills with women and children digging for hours to reach water that is often contaminated.

One woman we met had been waiting for her turn beside a shallow water hole for five hours. She told us she tries to arrive at 4 a.m. Sometimes, she said, she waits until 11 p.m. It’s become more than a full day’s work.

In a nearby Turkana community, the desperation is even more stark. As surface water disappears, people are forced to dig ever deeper into the riverbed. One woman broke her leg last week trying to climb out of a deep-water hole. We watched another woman dig, finally reaching visibly dirty water, which she drank immediately to quench her thirst. Another complained that all her livestock died due to thirst.

This is not resilience. It is exhaustion.

Humanitarians try to hold the line, providing sustainable solutions with the limited funding still available. Boreholes are dug. Solar-powered pumps and water pipes are installed to reduce reliance on unsafe water sources. Safe spaces are maintained for teenage mothers who otherwise have no support at all. Refugee-led organisations are supported to organize, advocate, and claim a voice at decision-making tables that have long excluded them. Health services are organized in the most remote of settings, where no other access exists.

But everywhere you go, the same message surfaces – this is not enough.

What dominates conversations among aid workers now is not expansion or innovation, but downsizing. Programs are shrinking. Organizations are leaving. Others are preparing to. It feels less like a system under strain than one quietly retreating.

Kakuma was already under pressure for years before the cuts. Globally, humanitarian funding is falling even as displacement reaches record highs – over 110 million people worldwide. Kakuma is not an exception. It is a warning.

The Kenyan government has a plan to integrate refugees into local systems, but so far little difference has been felt on the ground. Many refugees fear the erosion of their limited protections and rights, without new services or opportunities to replace them.

You cannot build livelihoods on empty stomachs. You cannot plan for integration when survival consumes every waking hour.

A year on from the cuts, this feels less like a humanitarian crisis being managed than a ticking time bomb being ignored.

How long is the world prepared to look away?