Women carry children along a street in Juba, South Sudan, Feb. 4, 2023. Catholic bishops and other faith leaders gathered in Nairobi, Kenya, Aug. 6-9 to appeal for debt relief to help African countries. (OSV News photo/Yara Nardi, Reuters) Mercy Sister in Nairobi says hunger is the worst in 40 years
Children are being born disabled in Nairobi’s Mukuru slum because their mothers are going hungry during pregnancy, an Irish Mercy Sister has warned, as cuts to international aid push the community into its worst crisis in four decades.
Sr Mary Killeen, who has directed the Mukuru Promotion Centre in Nairobi’s Mukuru slum since the mid-1980s, told The Irish Catholic that she has not seen conditions like these since she first arrived.
“In the last three years we’re getting increased starvation, and then it has a knock-on effect. You’re having increasing sickness, and now you’re having more children born disabled because of the hunger of the pregnant mothers,” she said.
She attributed the rising poverty, sickness and starvation largely to cuts in foreign aid, particularly the dismantling of USAID, and said it was “disappointing” to see her community left in such a desperate situation.
Her warning comes as EU governments negotiate the bloc’s 2028–2034 budget. On October 10, Ireland, which holds the EU Council Presidency, proposed a €38 billion cut to foreign aid, reducing the EU’s external action budget by 17%.
Yet Sr Mary said Irish people sceptical of aid spending were not wrong. Recent polling by More in Common, titled the ‘Ireland in the World’ Report, found that 53% of Irish adults believe some of the money spent on aid to poorer countries is wasted, 24% believe it is mostly wasted, and just 14% say it is mostly well spent.
“Half of the people believe that a lot of the aid is wasted and unfortunately, they’re probably quite right,” she said.
Money channelled through large NGOs or governments often “doesn’t actually reach the people on the ground”, she said. Smaller donors have become “very suspicious of world aid and government aid, so they come themselves and visit projects that are working with the poor”.
Aid works, she said, when donors see for themselves that their money is making a difference, and the onus is on officials to make sure it does.
“It’s upon the workers in Irish Aid and the EU workers. It’s upon them to make more efforts to see that the aid that’s given actually reaches somebody on the ground.”