Hello, welcome to the program. This is News Hour from the BBC World Service. We're coming to you live from London. I'm Paul Henley.

New research has predicted that more than 14 million of the world's most vulnerable people, a third of them children, could die because of the Trump administration's dismantling of US foreign aid.

A study in the prestigious Lancet Journal is published as world and business leaders gather for

a UN conference in Spain this week, hoping to shore up the global aid sector.

The US Agency for International Development had provided over 40% of global humanitarian

funding until Donald Trump returned to the White House in January. Two weeks later, Trump's

advisor and the world's richest man, Elon Musk, boasted of having put the agency through the woodchipper.

The government said 83% of its programs would

be cancelled. I've been speaking to one of the authors of this report in the Lancet, Davide Recella.

We first analysed the impact of use aid funding in the last two decades. Based on this study,

we projected the future. Other study conducted by independent

groups with different data sets and different methodologies are coming more or less to the same

magnitude of effect. We are all discussing about millions of deaths caused by USAID the defending in the next years.

Now USAID is a huge program and it covers vastly diverse aid.

How can you put them all together and be sure of an overall figure?

Yeah, and this is one of the strengths of the paper, but also one of the limitations.

So our initial idea for this first paper was to try to capture the effect of all intervention

of the USAID.

So it was from water and sanitation to education, to food supply for safety, to specific health-related intervention and strengthening of healthcare

system.

So we got this measure of funding that was funding per capita for each nation for each year,

and we used this as our exposure variable in the study.

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