NAIROBI, April 9, 2025 (BSS/AFP) - Children in South Sudan are dying from cholera as they walk miles unable to reach life-saving clinics closed after US aid cuts, an international NGO warned Wednesday.

The deeply impoverished nation has battled security since independence in 2011, with recent clashes threatening a fragile peace deal that ended a five-year civil war.

It is also seeing a resurgence in cholera: roughly 40,000 cases have been reported since September, UNICEF said, labelling it the worst outbreak in the nation's short history.

On Wednesday, British charity Save the Children said that it had recorded the deaths of at least five young South Sudanese as they walked hours to access life-saving care in the country's eastern Jonglei state.

The charity supported 27 clinics in eastern Akobo county but said due to USAID cuts, seven have been permanently shuttered, with the remaining 20 only partially open.

It said it had also had to lay off roughly 200 staff, out of almost 600 nationwide.

US President Donald Trump's cuts in USAID -- whose annual budget of close to $43 billion is roughly 40 percent of the world's humanitarian aid -- have impacted programmes around the globe.

"We used to be happy -- there were many doctors and enough medicine. We did not suffer much. But we are now suffering," said 24-year-old cholera patient Sarah, who gave only one name to the charity, in Jonglei.

Volunteer health worker Michael said since the cuts the community had struggled with a lack of medication.

"We see patients suffering, and we can't help."

"Now there is a serious cholera outbreak," he said, noting they could only offer patients oral rehydration salts.

The news comes after UNICEF said from September to March almost 700 cholera deaths had been reported, with half the cases children under 15 years old.

Of South Sudan's 10 states, UNICEF said, nine have been impacted with the majority in eastern Jonglei.

- 'Humanitarian catastrophe' -

"It's so heartbreaking to think about the situation in those areas, because what I saw was something out of a dystopian world," country director Chris Nyamandi told AFP.

He described a trip to eastern Akobo, in Jonglei, where ill children were stretched underneath trees outside as there was not enough room in the overflow tents.

"There should be global moral outrage that the decisions made by powerful people in other countries have led to child deaths in just a matter of weeks," he added in a statement.

He urged people to pay attention to the "humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in South Sudan -- a country where four out of five people need aid to survive."

Nyamandi said that one of the first steps was to ensure that tensions in South Sudan do not escalate, and further complicate medical access.

Parts of the country have lately seen fresh waves of violence, with clashes between forces allied to President Salva Kiir and his long-time rival, First Vice President Riek Machar, displacing tens of thousands.