Additional Context: This information was collected by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, from a survey conducted with 17 humanitarian actors at the regional and field level.

The SMART and ENSAN surveys, which collect primary data on nutrition status and food security in Mali, were not conducted in 2025. As a consequence, the Cadré Harmonisé, or CH, a regional food security analysis tool used across West and Central Africa to classify and project acute hunger, delayed publishing results for Mali as of April 2026.

Devex Researcher Note: According to Action Against Hunger, funding shortfalls explain the absence of SMART/ENSAN surveys in 2025, noting that 2024 CH data was used to project hunger gaps for 2025. Although it is known that the U.S. had funded CH through USAID and supported both CH and SMART/ENSAN in technical and data sharing capacity through the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, it is unclear how the nature of direct funding and support to these programs has evolved in 2026.

However, the reliance on technical partners for data inputs is well documented. Partners providing primary data include the World Food Programme, or WFP, the Food and Agricultural Organization, or FAO, and others significantly affected by U.S. aid cuts. Between 2024 and 2025, U.S. contributions to the WFP more than halved, from $4.45 billion in 2024 to $2.06 billion in 2025, making up 74% of its total funding decrease. These cuts forced WFP offices to "cut down on costly surveys." Likewise, the FAO atrributed a $180 million reduction in emergency and resillience programming to the termination of 98 U.S.-funded projects.

Source: OCHA