Conflict plunged 63 million children into hunger in 2025

Of the around 118 million children plunged into hunger so far in 2025, around 63 million – over half - were forced into this situation by conflict as opposed to drought or environmental or economic pressures, according to a new data analysis by Save the Children on World Food Day. [1]  

Save the Children analysed data from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the world’s leading authority on hunger monitoring, and found that conflict was a driving cause for the more severe forms of hunger in children in 2025. Of the 18 million children pushed into emergency levels of hunger in over 35 crises (IPC level 4+), 11 million, or over six in ten (61%), were in countries where conflict is the main driver of hunger, highlighting the role of violence and war in the world’s worst food crises. [2] 
 
While not all countries are analysed by the IPC or included in its Global Report on Food Crises, the data covers most of the world’s worst food crises.  
 
Globally, one in six children live in an area affected by conflict – compared to around 10% a decade ago. [3] Conflict remains the main driver of hunger worldwide and has a devastating impact on people’s ability to grow or buy food, forces families from their homes and destroys farmland and infrastructure. In some of the worst cases, starvation is used as a method of warfare.  
 
In Sudan and Gaza, conflict - coupled with severely restricted access and denials of aid - triggered famine classifications in 2024 and 2025 respectively, forcing children into the most extreme forms of hunger. Over half a million people in Gaza, and 638,000 people in Sudan - half of which are children in both places - face catastrophic hunger and a heightened risk of death, while around half a million more children in Gaza and 3.8 million in Sudan were found to be just one step away from catastrophe in IPC4. [4]  
 
Hannah Stephenson, Save the Children’s head of advocacy for hunger and nutrition said: 
 
“2025 has been a devastating year for the children living in the world’s worst conflict zones, with conflict pushing over 60 million children into hunger, including over 11 million who face emergency levels of hunger that necessitate desperate survival measures to stave off the risk of death.  
 
“In the twenty-first century, famine is manmade and preventable. No child should die because of hunger or malnutrition today. Without enough food or the right nutrition, children can’t learn, play, or grow. They should be safe to explore with their friends or expanding their minds in class, not worrying about where to find their next meal. 
 
“The international community has the power to stop hunger crises by seeking an end to the conflicts to drive them, fiercely protecting and investing in the first 1,000 days where action can make all the difference, and building more resilient food and health systems.  Ending hunger requires urgent political solutions to resolve these conflicts and guarantee unrestricted humanitarian access.” 
 
Save the Children has been providing life-saving nutritional support, including cash transfers to shore up the safety nets available to families in crisis, to children for more than 100 years. Between 2022 and 2024, Save the Children supported 43.5 million children and their families globally to aim to prevent malnutrition, but this support is now at risk. 
 
ENDS
   
[1] Methodology: Save the Children used the latest acute food insecurity data from IPC as per the September 2025 Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC) mid-year update (and any later IPC assessments made available since then) and considered the countries where conflict was the main driver as per the 2025 GRFC report and updated using the 2025 Hunger Hotspots report and later IPC assessments. Where both a current number and projected number of food insecure people was available for 2025, the higher number was taken. In a minority of cases (mostly where food security data in the GRFC comes from the 2025 UN Humanitarian Response Plans), the latest data is for 2024.  
 
Child shares were based on data from UN World Population Prospects and applied to the number of people facing IPC3, IPC4 and IPC5 to estimate children in each phase per country. The number of children affected is an estimate as numbers would likely be higher for poorer households/ those most at risk of hunger. 
 
[2] According to the IPC scale, a monitoring system for assessing hunger emergencies, Phase 3 is a crisis, Phase 4 is an emergency, and Phase 5 is used for when the situation is catastrophic, which is the worst scenario categorised by starvation, death, extremely critical acute malnutrition levels and in some cases, famine. International outrage is often sparked when Phase 5 is reached, but the reality is that even at Phase 3, families are forced to make impossible decisions, with malnutrition and hunger already at unacceptably high levels.