UNICEF: one million Afghan children have life-threatening malnutrition

One million children in Afghanistan have life-threatening severe acute malnutrition and could die without treatment, UNICEF’s representative in the country, Tajudeen Oyewale, said on Tuesday. Across the country 3.7 million children are wasted, meaning they are acutely malnourished. Oyewale spoke from Kabul in a briefing carried in Geneva. “If there is no treatment and we are not able to act fast, that one million number are at risk of dying,” he said.

The caseload is concentrated in the youngest children. Nearly 40 percent of those admitted to hospital with severe wasting and medical complications are babies under six months. Children under two account for 83 percent of severe acute malnutrition cases. More than 500,000 children have been admitted this year for high-risk moderate or severe wasting. Admissions of complicated severe cases rose from about 6,000 in July 2025 to more than 8,000 in July 2026, an increase of one third.

In parts of southern Afghanistan, Oyewale said, some hospitals now see three or four severely malnourished children for every available bed. Half of Afghanistan’s children live in what UNICEF calls severe child food poverty: they eat from two or fewer food groups a day. He said malnutrition is a central factor in the rise in deaths among the very young.

The funding line that is not moving

UNICEF’s nutrition programme in Afghanistan needs about $180 million this year. It is 22 percent funded. The wider nutrition sector faces a 57 percent gap. Aid cuts have closed more than 100 treatment sites. Ready-to-use therapeutic food, the paste that can pull a wasted child back from the edge if it arrives in time, depends on those sites and on the money that stocks them.

The agency released a photograph of 21-month-old Noor being fed therapeutic food by her mother at a UNICEF-supported centre in Qarakoozi, Badakhshan. That image is the version of the crisis that still has a clinic attached. The million children in the severe category include many who are not in a centre at all. When a site closes, the child does not move automatically to the next one. Distances in the south and the high valleys are long. A parent who already cannot assemble a decent meal may not be able to assemble a journey.

What the July numbers show

A one-third rise in complicated admissions year on year is a signal that the pipeline of untreated wasting is feeding hospitals faster than hospitals can clear beds. Three or four children per bed is a signal that the pipeline has arrived. These are not model outputs. They are ward counts from a health system that has been under strain since the 2021 political change, the freeze of assets, the drop in aid and successive dry seasons.

Germany deported 23 Afghan men to Kabul on the same day UNICEF gave these figures. The two facts sit on different desks. They describe the same country. A state that cannot keep a million children from the edge of starvation is the destination of those flights and the workplace of the remaining aid agencies.

Wasting is weight that has dropped too far for a child’s height. Severe acute malnutrition is the end of that scale, often with infection on top. Ready-to-use therapeutic food works when it is in the room and the child can still swallow. It does not work as a press statement. The 100 closed sites are rooms that no longer exist. The 22 percent funded programme is a warehouse that is not full. Those two facts convert Oyewale’s one million from a survey number into a countdown.

Donors have shifted money toward other crises and toward domestic budgets. Afghanistan is harder to fund when the de facto authorities restrict women aid workers and girls’ education. That restriction itself cuts the number of people who can run a nutrition site in a conservative district. Oyewale did not spend the briefing on that political argument. He spent it on beds, admissions and a budget line that is four-fifths empty.

His request is specific. Treat the million. Restock the sites. Close the hole in the nutrition budget. Without that, he said, the number at risk of dying stays at one million. The July admission curve is already pointing up. Winter and the next lean season will not flatten it on their own.