Updated: December 2025
Right now, 343 million people across 74 countries are facing acute food insecurity, putting children at risk of malnutrition and forcing families to make impossible choices, like skipping meals, selling what they need to survive, and pulling children out of school.
Globally, 12.2 million children under five suffer from severe wasting—the most life-threatening form of malnutrition, otherwise known as severe acute malnutrition. This is when muscles shrink, appetite disappears, vision blurs, and hair becomes brittle. Without treatment, vital organs swell and eventually fail. Read more about severe acute malnutrition.
How is it possible that in 2025 children are still dying from something entirely preventable? Over recent years, a perfect storm has formed: rising conflict, increasing inequality, soaring food prices affecting households everywhere, and extreme weather driven by climate change. Together, these forces have made malnutrition one of the biggest killers of young children worldwide.
And yet it doesn't have to be this way. Community-based programmes combining medical treatment and therapeutic foods have a 90% success rate in treating severe wasting. While our research in Somalia has shown that combining cash transfers with nutrition education for parents can effectively prevent children from becoming malnourished in the first place.
We know what works. We have the solutions. What's missing is political will.
The cost of political inaction
With so much competing for attention—from domestic pressures in Western democracies to a shifting geopolitical landscape—meaningful action on this crisis has been frustratingly slow. Famine has been confirmed in multiple regions in Sudan and it may be imminent in more communities if the violence continues. Famine was also confirmed in Gaza in 2025. Food crises continue to spread across multiple regions, with South Sudan, Haiti and Mali also experiencing catastrophic levels of food insecurity, according to the 2025 Global Report on Food Crises.
That's why Save the Children has joined civil society organisations worldwide to highlight the political cost of inaction. We know what governments need to do: fund life-saving efforts and tackle the root causes. While funding is urgently needed, money alone won't end hunger. We need food systems that work for people and the planet. We need global leaders to pursue peace and uphold international humanitarian law, invest in climate safety, and protect the natural world.
The solutions are within reach. What's lacking is the political courage to act.
Pushing for action
Ahead of a global nutrition summit in March 2025, we worked with Save the Children ambassadors Sir Mo Farah and Misan Harriman to raise awareness and engage MPs. We also partnered with Action Against Hunger and celebrity chefs to deliver a letter to No. 10, calling for the UK government to make a strong pledge at the summit. Behind the scenes, we also ensured policy solutions reached leaders' desks.
It was one step in pushing this crisis up the agenda, resulting in UK commitments to improve their approach to tackling child malnutrition. This was a welcome start, but with global aid cuts already having a devastating impact on efforts to reach the most vulnerable children, we know that there is more we must do.
During the United Nations General Assembly in September 2025, we led a joint statement with 30 organisations raising the alarm on the global child wasting crisis and the impact of aid cuts, calling for global leaders to take action. The statement was shared by world leaders, including Ban Ki Moon (8th Secretary-General of the United Nations). As co-chairs of a global wasting advocacy coalition, we will continue to press world leaders to act, because no child should ever face malnutrition.
We’re also campaigning with young people on the root causes of hunger, including conflict and climate change. On World Peace Day we collaborated with our Young Peacemakers Assembly to create a powerful video to share the personal stories of young people who have experienced leaving their home and resettling in the UK.
And through our Generation Hope campaign, we are advocating to the global community to recognise the connections between the climate crisis and inequality, and to address the two issues together. In the world’s biggest listening exercise of its kind, we spoke to more than 54,500 children in 41 different countries to learn more about their experiences of climate change and economic inequality.
What happens next
I firmly believe in the power of people to advocate, campaign and stand alongside those experiencing the worst of humanity. Huge progress has been made in recent decades to reduce global hunger, and we'll get back there.
We need to maintain momentum across upcoming political moments, but also build people power from every community worldwide to force leaders into making the right choices for all. Because when it comes to child malnutrition, we have everything we need to solve this—except the collective will to make it happen.
Key Facts
- 343 million people across 74 countries face acute food insecurity (2025)
- 12.2 million children under five suffer from severe wasting globally (2024)
- Community-based malnutrition treatment programmes have a 90% success rate
- At least 14 million children face disruptions to nutrition services in 2025 due to funding cuts
