Falastine’s infant son wouldn’t stop crying. The one-month-old cried as his exhausted mother tended the goats on the rocky slopes of Al Dhale’e governorate in Yemen. He cried as she harvested vegetables and collected water from the well. And he cried as his father worked as an agricultural laborer, seldom bringing home enough money to feed the family of five.

22-year-old Falastine suspected the cause of her baby’s tears: she was struggling to produce enough breast milk to feed him. In Yemen, about 2.4 million pregnant and lactating women and 5 million children under five will require treatment for acute malnutrition in 2024, according to OCHA, while an estimated 17.6 million people are severely food insecure—meaning that they have run out of food and sometimes go days without eating. Mothers like Falastine often go hungry so that their families can eat a little extra. However, if mothers don’t get enough food for themselves, their babies also suffer the consequences.

A baby that isn’t breastfed within an hour of birth is 40% more likely to die before they are one month old, according to UNICEF. If they aren’t breastfed for the first 24 hours, this risk of death rises to 80%. It’s no coincidence that Yemen is among the countries with the highest infant mortality rates in the world, with an estimated 44.6 deaths per 1,000 live births—nine times higher than that of the United States.

International Medical Corps report

Many women in Yemen are unaware that breastfeeding can reduce the risk of malnutrition among their children and its associated complications.

The vicious cicle between limited or non access to food and inability to breastfeed

In 2021, 51 per cent of women admitted for maternity care at Abs hospital were malnourished, while four per cent had severe acute malnutrition.

In 2022, this rose to 64 per cent, with 6 per cent suffering from severe acute malnutrition. By February 2024, a massive 68 per cent of women admitted to the maternity department were malnourished.

Sixty kilometres away from Abs, in the MSF-supported Al-Qanawis mother and child hospital in Al-Hudaydah governorate, it is a similar picture. In 2023, 47 per cent of women admitted were malnourished, rising to 49 per cent in February 2024.

Relief Web report

Yemen’s population number has barely increased since the start of the war despite the birth rate being at 4 children per woman.