UNICEF said on 25 August that the number of Afghan children admitted to hospital with severe acute malnutrition complicated by illness rose by about a third over the past year, from roughly 6,000 in July 2025 to 8,000 in July 2026.
The agency put the number of children with wasting nationwide at 3.7 million, of whom about one million have the severe, life-threatening form. More than half a million children have been admitted for high-risk moderate or severe wasting since the start of the year. Close to forty per cent of severe wasting admissions are babies under six months old, and children under two account for eighty-three per cent of severe cases — the ages at which the damage is least reversible.
Two figures explain the pressure on wards. Half of Afghanistan’s children are living in what UNICEF classifies as severe child food poverty, eating from two or fewer food groups a day. At the same time more than a hundred nutrition treatment sites have closed this year compared with 2025, as the nutrition response runs a funding gap of fifty-seven per cent; UNICEF’s own nutrition programme, requiring $180 million, is twenty-two per cent funded. In hospitals in the south the agency counted three to four severely malnourished children for every available bed. Roughly six million people have returned to the country since 2023, more than half of them children.
“We can see this crisis coming,” said Dr Tajudeen Oyewale, UNICEF’s representative in Afghanistan. “Seeing a crisis coming also means we have an opportunity to prevent it from becoming much worse.”
The winter months, when respiratory illness compounds undernutrition, begin in about ten weeks.