GENEVA: The United Nations warned on Tuesday that the global aid funding crisis could be paid in children´s lives in Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh, unless sustainable funds emerge fast.

Huge numbers of the persecuted and stateless Rohingya community live in squalid relief camps in Bangladesh, most having arrived after fleeing a 2017 military crackdown in neighbouring Myanmar.

Successive aid cuts have already caused severe hardship among Rohingya in the overcrowded settlements, who are reliant on aid and suffer from rampant malnutrition. The UN children´s agency Unicef said youngsters in the camps were experiencing the worst levels of malnutrition since 2017, with admissions for severe malnutrition treatment up 27 percent in February compared with the same months in 2024.

US President Donald Trump imposed a freeze on US foreign aid in January pending a review, sending shockwaves through the humanitarian community. Following the review, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Monday that Washington was cancelling 83 percent of programmes at the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

“An aid funding crisis risks becoming a child survival crisis,” Rana Flowers, Unicef´s representative in Bangladesh, told journalists in Geneva, speaking from Dhaka. “More than 500,000 children live in the camps of Cox´s Bazar. Over 15 percent are now malnourished — an emergency threshold,” she said.