“A shorter transfer time could have saved her life. When [the midwife] told me, I was shocked and cried. As women, we put ourselves in her place. She left behind two daughters—it’s truly tragic. A mother’s departure is not just the loss of children or a husband, but the disintegration of an entire family. It’s very difficult, a soul is lost.”
These are the words of a doctor in Yemen, describing the death of a young woman named Fatima. Reporting from the Guardian documents how, in May 2025, Fatima died on the way to a hospital 1.5 hours away, as her nearby hospital lost US funding and could no longer offer emergency obstetric care.
One year after the United States abruptly cut billions of dollars in foreign aid, the impact has been devastating, particularly for women and girls: Women have died in childbirth, millions of survivors of gender-based violence have lost access to lifesaving care, and thousands of girls have been forced to drop out of school.
Today, on the one-year anniversary of the executive order pausing US foreign aid, WRC has released a new report offering the first comprehensive evidence review of the devastating consequences for women and girls across humanitarian crises.
The takeaway from the evidence is clear: billions of dollars in humanitarian aid supporting women and girls were cut virtually overnight, resulting in documented deaths and the abrupt disruption of lifesaving programs and services for millions of women and girls across some of the world’s most volatile crises.
At the same time, available evidence likely underestimates the full impact of aid cuts. Furthermore, US funding cuts are just one piece of a broader context of global backsliding on funding and policy commitments to gender equality.
WRC is calling on donors and policymakers to urgently restore and protect funding that addresses the unique needs of women and girls in humanitarian crises, advancing the principle that gender-responsive humanitarian programming is lifesaving, life-sustaining, and an investment in long-term peace and stability. Donors must prioritize support for women-led organizations, who are often on the frontlines of crisis response, and they must mitigate the harms of funding cuts through gradual transitions, investments in local capacity, and evidence generation on the impacts of funding cuts. We must rebuild the humanitarian response with gender equality and local leadership at its core—for the millions of women and girls like Fatima, in need of lifesaving humanitarian assistance to persevere through crisis.