A Nepali village that recorded zero newborn deaths in 2024 has seen five infants die within months of the United States cutting funding to a maternal health programme, an Associated Press investigation has found.
Health officials in Prempur Gonahi, in Nepal's Rautahat district, said the deaths returned once outreach workers stopped visiting pregnant women at home.
Before the US-funded scheme began, the village recorded between ten and fifteen neonatal deaths annually, a local official told the Associated Press. That figure fell to zero by 2024. Officials now warn the true toll since funding lapsed could be higher, since the cuts also disrupted the systems used to record deaths.
What the Cancelled Programme Provided
The initiative was a five-year, £27.5 million ($35 million) scheme that reached more than 100,000 women and girls across Nepal in its first three years, the investigation found.
It funded birthing centres, trained nurses and midwives, and paid female community health volunteers to visit pregnant women in villages with little other access to medical guidance.
Volunteers taught women to recognise warning signs, such as swelling or unusual bleeding, and often accompanied them to prenatal appointments.
In one birthing centre in Rautahat district, officials said attendance at prenatal check-ups had fallen by half since the programme ended. Mona Sherpa, country director for the aid organisation CARE Nepal, which lost more than half its funding as a result of the cuts, said the change had been abrupt.
'The number of deaths of mothers, young mothers, during delivery has really increased,' Sherpa said, according to the Associated Press. 'The expected number within a year is happening within four to six months.'
A local official, Sadho Baitha, said it took roughly ten months, barely longer than a full pregnancy, for neonatal deaths to reappear in the village of Prempur Gonahi once funding stopped. The first death in the village was recorded in December, with four more by March.
Hunter Biden unloads on Elon Musk and President Trump over USAID.
— Resist the Mainstream (@ResisttheMS) August 12, 2026
He calls their move "akin to genocide."
Biden also claims studies project that 4 million children under 5 could die by 2030 as a result of the cuts.
pic.twitter.com/2KhBMETzgw
The Human Cost Behind the Numbers
Kabita Mukhiya, a twenty-year-old woman from a village near the Indian border, died in December while 28 weeks pregnant. She had suffered severe anaemia, having lost access to nutrition supplements she received during an earlier pregnancy once funding was withdrawn.
Mukhiya endured stomach pain, swelling and delirium at home for weeks before her aunt took her to hospital. By then it was too late.
She and her unborn child both died, with doctors attributing the deaths to eclampsia worsened by anaemia, conditions health professionals say are usually manageable with consistent prenatal care.
Rajkumari Patel, a former outreach worker with the now defunct programme, said the case reflected exactly what home visits were meant to prevent.
'I would have asked her, "Is the baby kicking? When did you last feel movement?" I would have checked for swelling in her hands and face. I would have looked at her eyes for signs of anaemia,' Patel said, according to the Associated Press.
'These are the signs I would have noticed in Kabita and said, "This woman needs a hospital today — not tomorrow." Maybe we could have saved her life.'
The disruption to nutrition programmes has affected the wider region. In Kabita's own province, the prevalence of wasting among children under five rose from 7.4 per cent before the cuts to 12.3 per cent afterwards, according to government and aid agency data cited in the investigation.
.@POTUS's dismantling of USAID has cost lives and hurt the United States's reputation around the world. Congress must pass my Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Act to stop this cruelty. https://t.co/n4uIgcS6El
— Dina Titus (@repdinatitus) August 13, 2026
Washington's Response and Wider Fears
The US State Department has said it continues to support maternal and child health programmes in Nepal, and has argued other countries should increase their own contributions to global health assistance.
The Gates Foundation has projected that 2025 could mark the first year this century in which child mortality rises globally, a trend linked to reduced funding from the US and other donor nations, the Associated Press reported.
Officials in Rautahat say mortality monitoring itself remains compromised, meaning the true scale of the crisis may not be known for some time.
