UN Says 10 of Amhara’s 16 Working Mobile Health and Nutrition Teams Will Shut Down by the End of October for Lack of Funds

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Round stone homesteads with conical thatched roofs on a dry, open highland plain under a blue sky.

Rural homesteads in the highlands of the Amhara region between Weldiya and Lalibela, North Wollo, in 2014. [file photo] [Wikimedia Commons, Ji-Elle, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Ten of the 16 mobile health and nutrition teams still working in the Amhara region are expected to stop by the end of this month because the money has run out, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on Wednesday, in a region that needs 57 of them.

“Humanitarian needs continue to far outpace available resources,” OCHA said in its update. “In Amhara, for example, only 16 of the 57 Mobile Health and Nutrition Teams needed are currently operating, with 10 of the 16 expected to shut down operations by the end of the month.” The teams travel to people who cannot reach a clinic, which in much of Amhara now means villages cut off by the war between the Ethiopian federal government and Fano forces and camps full of people who have fled it.

The same update said food partners were getting ready to bring assistance to about 100,000 people in the Wag Hamra and North Wollo zones, both of them close to the fighting along Amhara’s border with Tigray. In Tigray, OCHA said more medical, nutrition and other supplies had reached communities and health facilities, with more on the way, and that the UN’s humanitarian coordinator, Ozonnia Ojielo, had met officials of the new caretaker administration that Abiy Ahmed’s government set up for the region and pressed for unhindered access. Work goes on in Afar too, OCHA said, but “limited funding remains a major obstacle.”

Addis Standard, which reported the figures on Wednesday, said the shortfall reaches well beyond health care. Earlier this month it reported that displaced people in camps in Debre Birhan were going without enough food, medicine and health care as aid groups cut back or left, and residents of the China camp there, which it said holds about 11,976 people, told the paper that organizations had ended or were preparing to end their work as their money and project periods ran out. The paper also cited an estimate that, as of early 2025, more than 660,000 people were living in 31 displacement sites and collective centers across seven zones of Amhara.

The warning came a week after the UN’s emergency relief chief, Tom Fletcher, released $8.5 million from the Central Emergency Response Fund for Tigray, Amhara, Afar and Benishangul-Gumuz, money the UN said would reach more than 202,700 people. The World Health Organization said on Wednesday that it had delivered nearly 96 metric tonnes of medical supplies to 64 places in Afar, Amhara and Tigray, and that it was supporting mobile health and nutrition teams among other emergency services. Aid work in the country has also become more dangerous. On Tuesday the Ethiopian Red Cross Society said OCHA had sent condolences over the killing of one of its ambulance drivers in Dangur woreda, in the Metekel zone of Benishangul-Gumuz.

On X, the news drew only a handful of reactions by Thursday morning. Kelala Brief (@kelalabrief), which says it provides briefs on developments in Ethiopia and the Horn, summed up the update as “humanitarian needs in Amhara and Tigray far exceed available resources.” Replying to Addis Standard’s post, Mikael Saari (@MikaelSaarks6j) wrote, “10 of 16 health teams in Amhara shutting down by October,” and asked who was protecting “the same vulnerable youth” from being recruited abroad. Another reply, from an account posting as Josh (@RRagassa), simply asked the paper, “Why don’t you contribute some money?” Zegabi searched X in Amharic and Tigrigna for reaction from health workers or displaced people in Amhara and found none by 9:40 a.m. ET on Thursday.

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