Farah waited silently in the corridor of the pediatric ward at Abala Hospital in northern Ethiopia. Sitting on a small bench with her 8-month-old baby on her lap, the 32-year-old woman appeared calm that morning. “He’s almost recovered because he’s eating properly now,” she said, adjusting the yellow scarf slipping from her forehead. “When I first came here two months ago, he was very sick. Because of his diarrhea, he became very weak. I was scared.” Farah, a single mother of three, has never been able to feed her baby the way she wanted to. “I didn’t have milk,” she said. “I eat very little myself: a bit of bread in the morning and sometimes a piece in the evening. I cannot afford real meals. The little money we have comes from my eldest son, who sells toothbrushes on the street.”
Like Farah, every day, dozens of mothers turn up at Abala hospital with their malnourished children. Between January and February 2025, 1,768 new cases of severe acute malnutrition were detected, an increase of 44.3% compared to the same period in 2024, according to the non-governmental organization Première Urgence Internationale, which oversees treatment in the ward. In this arid region, the prevalence of this condition stands at 15%, exceeding the critical threshold set by the World Health Organization. In its latest report published in January 2025, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a US-based alert and prevention network, classified the northwest of the region, where Abala is located, as being in an “emergency situation” – one step short of famine. In total, in Ethiopia, more than 10 million people suffer from hunger and malnutrition, the World Food Program warned in April.
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