How Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food Is Saving Malnourished Children in Yemen

Spread the Word

In a country where hunger has become one of the gravest threats facing the youngest generation, a simple sachet of energy-dense paste is proving to be a lifeline. Ready-to-use therapeutic food, widely known as RUTF, has emerged as one of the most effective tools available to health workers battling severe acute malnutrition in Yemen, offering a path to recovery for children whose lives hang in the balance after years of conflict, displacement and economic collapse.

RUTF is a high-energy paste, typically made from peanuts and fortified with the vitamins and minerals a wasting child needs to rebuild strength. Its great advantage lies in its simplicity. The paste can be eaten straight from the sachet, with no need for water, refrigeration or cooking, which makes it ideally suited to emergencies and to remote areas where clean water and functioning clinics are scarce. A severely malnourished child can be treated at home, with caregivers administering the paste over a course of several weeks under the guidance of community health workers.

The results can be remarkable. Aid agencies report that around nine out of ten children who receive a full course of RUTF recover from severe acute malnutrition within a matter of weeks, often transforming from listless and dangerously thin to active and gaining weight. That kind of turnaround, documented repeatedly in Yemen’s nutrition programmes, is why the treatment has been described as one of the most cost-effective life-saving interventions in modern humanitarian work. Therapeutic food has been used to treat childhood malnutrition for roughly three decades, and over that time it has saved the lives of millions of children worldwide; in 2025 alone, UNICEF reported screening hundreds of millions of children for wasting and treating more than nine million who were affected.

The scale of need in Yemen is staggering. According to a joint assessment by the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Food Programme and UNICEF, roughly 2.4 million children under the age of five suffer from acute malnutrition across the country, alongside some 1.5 million pregnant and breastfeeding women. In government-controlled areas, the number of young children affected by wasting rose by about 34 per cent in a single year, climbing to more than 600,000, of whom around 120,000 were classed as severely malnourished and at the highest risk of death.

Malnutrition is not merely a matter of hunger. For a small child, severe wasting weakens the immune system, leaving the body unable to fight off the infections that so often prove fatal. It stunts physical growth and can impair cognitive development, casting a long shadow over a child’s future even if they survive the immediate crisis. In Yemen, malnutrition ranks among the leading causes of death for children under five, which is what gives the steady, unglamorous work of screening and treatment such urgency.

The typical journey of recovery begins with detection. Community health workers and volunteers screen children by measuring the circumference of the upper arm and checking for the swelling that signals the most dangerous forms of malnutrition. Those identified as severely affected are enrolled in treatment programmes and supplied with RUTF, while their progress is tracked at regular intervals. Cases documented by UNICEF in Yemen describe children arriving at clinics frail and unwell, then returning week after week visibly stronger as the treatment takes hold, a pattern that has come to embody the quiet hope these programmes provide.

Yet the gains remain fragile, and they depend on resources that are increasingly uncertain. Humanitarian operations in Yemen have faced severe funding shortfalls, with the United Nations response plan for 2025 only a fraction funded, forcing agencies to scale back services even as needs climbed. Nutrition programmes are particularly vulnerable to such cuts, because a break in the supply of therapeutic food can mean the difference between recovery and relapse for a child already on the edge. Aid workers warn that without sustained financing, hard-won progress could quickly unravel.

The broader context is a humanitarian emergency that has gripped Yemen since the conflict escalated in 2015. The United Nations estimated that around 19.5 million people needed assistance in 2025, with millions displaced from their homes and basic services battered by years of war. Damaged water and sanitation systems have fuelled disease outbreaks, while a collapsing economy has pushed food prices beyond the reach of many families. In that environment, malnutrition is both a symptom of the wider crisis and a driver of further suffering.

Addressing it requires more than therapeutic food alone. Lasting progress depends on restoring access to clean water, rebuilding health services, supporting families’ incomes and ensuring that aid can reach the communities that need it most. RUTF treats the acute emergency, but preventing children from becoming severely malnourished in the first place calls for investment across all of these areas, alongside the political stability that has so far eluded the country.

For now, the sachets of fortified paste remain a frontline defence, carried into clinics and homes across Yemen by health workers determined to keep children alive. Each recovery is a small victory against an enormous crisis, and a reminder that even amid war and hardship, effective and affordable interventions exist. The challenge for Yemen and its international partners is to ensure that those interventions reach every child who needs them, before malnutrition claims lives that a simple treatment could have saved.